ONLINE: Melissa Faliveno

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Maggie Walsh

Melissa Faliveno in front of a window.

Melissa Faliveno

Releasing a new book during a pandemic is tricky. But Melissa Faliveno's new book of essays on Midwestern life — Tomboyland — is worth seeking out. You can order it in hardcover or paperback through A Room of One's Own, which is also hosting a virtual conversation by Faliveno and LAMBDA Literary Award winner Melissa Febos (author of Abandon Me). Tomboyland charts Faliveno's childhood and adolescence in nearby Mount Horeb, where the author recalls the 1984 Barneveld tornado and her shifts in consciousness as she comes to terms with queerness and Midwestern values.

press release: On Wednesday, August 12, Melissa Faliveno, (from Mount Horeb & Madison, now living in Brooklyn, NYC) will be in conversation with Melissa Febos through an online event hosted by A Room of One's Own! RSVP now.

This event is for you if you are a fan of memoir, essays, Midwestern narratives, queerness, explorations of gender and class, Melissa Febos, and/or kink. Surprise: Room's co-owner, Gretchen Treu, is interviewed in this book!

Melissa Faliveno will be signing and personalizing books so preorder now! In the comment of your order write what you would like the personalization to be.

A Room of One's Own is currently closed to the public but you can get your book either by choosing vestibule pickup or shipping at checkout.

In this intrepid debut essay collection, Melissa Faliveno traverses the liminal spaces of her childhood in working-class Wisconsin and the paths she’s traveled since, compelled by questions of girlhood and womanhood, queerness and class, and how the lands of our upbringing both define and complicate us even long after we’ve left. Part personal narrative, part cultural reportage TOMBOYLAND navigates midwestern traditions, mythologies, landscapes, and lives to explore the intersections of identity and place. From F5 tornadoes and fast-pitch softball to gun culture, strange glacial terrains, kink party potlucks, and the question of motherhood TOMBOYLAND asks curious and critical questions about belonging and the body, isolation and community, and what we mean when we use words like woman, family, and home.

Melissa Faliveno is a writer, editor, musician, teacher, and Wisconsinite in New York City. Her debut essay collection, TOMBOYLAND, about gender, class, and the American Midwest, is forthcoming from Jill Soloway’s Topple Books on August 4, 2020. Her work has appeared in Poets & Writers, Prairie Schooner, DIAGRAM, Essay Daily, Green Mountains Review, Lumina, and Midwestern Gothic, among others, and received a notable selection in Best American Essays. She has profiled USWNT star Megan Rapinoe and musician Valerie June.

Melissa Febos is the author of the critically acclaimed memoir, Whip Smart (St. Martin’s Press 2010), and the essay collection, Abandon Me (Bloomsbury 2017), which was a LAMBDA Literary Award finalist, a Publishing Triangle Award finalist, an Indie Next Pick, and was named a Best Book of 2017 by Esquire, Book Riot, Bustle, Medium, Refinery29, The Rumpus, and others. The inaugural winner of the Jeanne Córdova Nonfiction Award from LAMBDA Literary, her work has appeared or is forthcoming in publications including The Paris Review, The Kenyon Review, Tin House, Granta, The New York Times, McSweeney’s, The New York Times Book Review, The Guardian, Elle, and Vogue. Her book GIRLHOOD will be released March 2021 and is available now for pre-order.