About this item
A fiercely personal and startlingly universal essay collection about the mysteries of gender and desire, of identity and class, of the stories we tell and the places we call home.Flyover country, the middle of nowhere, the space between the coasts. The American Midwest is a place beyond definition, whose very boundaries are a question. It's a place of rolling prairies and towering pines, where guns in bars and trucks on blocks are as much a part of the landscape as rivers and lakes and farms. Where girls are girls and boys are boys, where women are mothers and wives, where one is taught to work hard and live between the lines. But what happens when those lines become increasingly unclear? When a girl, like the land that raised her, finds herself neither here nor there?In this intrepid collection of essays, 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.
About the Author
Melissa Faliveno is the author of the essay collection TOMBOYLAND, published in August 2020, which in a starred review Publishers Weekly calls "a winning debut." The former senior editor of Poets & Writers Magazine, her essays and interviews have appeared in Esquire, Paris Review, Bitch, Ms. Magazine, Literary Hub, Prairie Schooner, DIAGRAM, and Midwestern Gothic, among others, and received a notable selection in Best American Essays 2016. She has taught nonfiction writing at Sarah Lawrence College and Catapult in New York City, and is the 2020-2021 Kenan Visiting Writer at UNC Chapel Hill. Born and raised in small-town Wisconsin, she lives in Brooklyn, New York. www.melissafaliveno.com
