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. 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, Faliveno asks curious, honest, and often darkly funny questions about belonging and the body, isolation and community, and what we mean when we use words like woman , family , and home . One of the Best Books of 2020, according to NPR, Electric Literature, the New York Public Library, and Debutiful “[A] winning debut collection…Readers who prefer to answer their questions about gender and sexuality with more questions will appreciate this perceptive meditation.” — Publishers Weekly (starred review) “Delves deeply into gender identity and the many confusions and complications involved…Throughout the collection, Faliveno remains inquisitive and resistant to labels, always maintaining her empowering agency…the essays are well-rendered investigations of self-identity. An expressive voice evolving deliberately, resisting having to be one thing or the other.” — Kirkus Reviews “Encountering Faliveno is a pleasure…a sensitive commentator on the topsy-turvy world of the gender systems she grew up in and an exquisite self-analyst of her own androgyny…writing with a quality of cinematic vividness…Recommended.” — Library Journal “Faliveno’s dynamic essay collection…inhabits the spaces in-between—male and female, Wisconsin and New York, personal and political, fear and desire—and probes the profound paradoxes of personhood.” —OprahMag.com “A wonder to read. Bravo.” — Alma “Together, the essays offer a full-dress portrait of a writer whom most readers will be intrigued to know.” — Booklist “Melissa Faliveno transports readers to the Midwest, a region of the country that, not unlike the idea of a ‘tomboy,’ resists neat categorization. The book blends personal essays with culture reporting to explore the liminal spaces Faliveno—and so many other queer folks—inhabit and navigate each and every day.” — NewNowNext “In this essay collection about identity, class, sex, and gender, you’ll find deeply personal revelations that anyone can connect with. Each essay offers a unique perspective on topics we’ve all thought about, whether we’re a tomboy from the suburbs, a straight mountain man, or anything in between. Because there is no binary.” — Electric Literature “Gender, class, geographic placing, and so much more are explored honestly and fully in this collection of essays.” —Vogue.com “In her debut collection of essays, [Faliveno] examines the complicated—and often contradictory—parts of her life: the first time she shot a gun; her experiences in BDSM as a feminist; and navigating androgyny and bisexuality, womanhood and rage, religion and myth, loneliness and love.” —PureWow “These essays are a love letter to, reckoning with, and examination of [Faliveno’s] midwestern upbringing…Faliveno doesn't always definitively answer the questions she asks—and after all, how could she, when existential issues of identity, belonging, language, and the body are rarely if ever static—but she does manage to get satisfyingly close…to have roots, Tomboyland seems to be saying, is to have the ability to grow upward, out, and sometimes away, but to always have a context to return to.” —NPR.org “The book is a love letter to the Midwest, celebrating its strength and complexities.” —Wisconsin Public Radio “Faliveno is an excellent essayist, expertly braiding seemingly disparate threads into engrossing and funny explorations of self and society…The theme of violence intertwined with fear, love and reverence for place and created family propels Tomboyland into captivating territory. On the surface, its beautiful prose belies the