Melissa Faliveno: On the Desire to Feel at Home, Practicing Vulnerability and Her Debut Essay Collection, "Tomboyland"
Melisa Faliveno’s new essay collection, Tomboyland, is a fiercely personal reflection on the mysteries of gender and desire, of the body and womanhood, of the stories we tell and the places we call home, liminal space and cultural roots, and what it means to come from a small town. With a sharp yet curious voice, Faliveno resists duality as she questions having to be one thing or another. Instead, the heart of this collection is about human beings and storytelling, how we desire community and a place called home , and to embrace “the fluidity of life.”
I spoke with Melissa about identity and labels, the desire to feel at home, the art of storytelling, practicing vulnerability, and her debut essay collection, Tomboyland.
Labels and identity are something you grapple with throughout these essays, specifically in the essay, Tomboy. While you seem resistant to the idea of labels, you still want to understand what identifies you as a person and a woman. I found the way you approach this very empowering and nonjudgemental. Can you speak about our society's obsession with labels? Do you think it's a natural human desire to want to compartmentalize everything, including our own identities? Or do you think this something that has been pushed onto us as a society?
That’s a great question, and I’m not sure I have the answer. Certainly the need to compartmentalize and label is a socially learned thing, but I do wonder sometimes if there’s also something built in to our DNA to want to belong, some searching quality we all share for connection, or family, or home. Either way, we all learn it, and we all have it, this need to fit in, to find our people or crew or community. At the heart of it, I think, is the desire to feel like we’re part of something, that we’re safe, that we’re loved, that we’re accepted, that our existence can be comprehended and understood by others, that our lives thus hold meaning. It’s why language exists too—we create words to make meaning of ourselves, of our lives, of the world. And so much of that essay, “Tomboy,” is about the language around our bodies and our sexualities, our gender and race and class, for instance, and this need we all feel, that I’ve felt very acutely, to give myself a word or words that fit, and never fully being able to, and learning to be okay with that; to use words sometimes and then other times choose not to, to embrace the fluidity of life and our bodies and our identities, to at once push against that deep-seated desire to categorize, and also to embrace those categories when we need to. Beyond words, beyond classification, we make meaning internally too; we build our own understandings and values, and we try to live them. I think—and this is what Tomboyland is about, really—it’s all part of the desire to feel at home.
Your body and how it moves through the world are at the forefront of Tomboyland, as you ask yourself What are you? And then honestly answer, “I don’t really know.” You also say that your body has never been a simple answer to a question. Did you feel a sense of vulnerability when putting this question to the page? Were there other areas that felt more vulnerable than others to write? How do you work through that as a nonfiction writer and personal essayist?
Absolutely. I still do. Most of the book feels like an exercise in practicing vulnerability, and that is not a feeling I’m used to or comfortable with—I’m Midwestern, after all. Since the book has been out, I’ve gotten so much incredible support, but there have been a small handful of responses, some from people who purport to love me, that have been hurtful. And there are days when I think, “Why would I ever choose to do this?” And then I get a letter from a friend, or an email from a stranger, saying how much the book meant to them, how it helped them feel seen, how it expanded their understanding in some way, and I remember why. I don’t think it’ll ever not feel terrifying, having all these very personal details about my life and my body out in the world. But as long as people are connecting to it, and feeling seen by it, and learning from it—about themselves, or me, or the world—it feels worth it.
I loved how you weaved mythology, traditions, and interviews into your writing about the Midwest. Can you speak a little about what your research process looked like? What was it like sort of re-exploring the landscape you grew up in through these different lenses?
Research is one of my favorite parts about writing nonfiction. (To a fault—I can do days and weeks and months of research, and I often have to force myself to stop and get to the writing.) For this book, I did a lot of reading, as I always do—books, articles, the usual—but I also went a lot deeper. I spent hours in the small public library archives in Barneveld, Wisconsin, to learn more about the tornado that destroyed the town in 1984 (the subject of the opening essay, “The Finger of God”). I read old newspaper clippings and magazine articles and letters, pored over residents’ photo albums that were donated to the archive. I walked through that town and others, in this place where I grew up, to get a feel for the landscapes I used to know by heart, and in some cases still do. I did a lot of driving around Wisconsin, a lot of hiking in the woods and sitting at dive bars and talking to people in the areas I was writing about. I interviewed close to two dozen people—storm survivors, queer people, mothers, daughters, gun owners, other writers, friends, family members, my parents—and wove some of those stories into my own. So much of this book is about storytelling—the stories we get told, the stories we tell ourselves, how we make meaning of ourselves and our lives through stories, and how stories change over time—so the interviewing was crucial for that. It was also the most fun I had working on this book. I got my start as a writer in local journalism and cultural reportage, and I just really love listening to other people tell their stories. I listen for hours, then transcribe their words and write it all down, then try to hear both the story on the surface and the story beneath it. Through the process, I’m trying to figure out how these other peoples’ stories align or diverge from my own stories and experiences and thoughts on a given topic. It’s fascinating, and it helps me better understand them as individuals, a larger community, myself, and humans in general. It’s the kind of work I hope to do for the rest of my life.
Have you always written nonfiction? Is it the genre you most gravitate towards? If yes, why do you think that is?
I’ve been writing nonfiction seriously since college, when I first stumbled into a creative nonfiction writing workshop at the University of Wisconsin. I thought, before then, that I might dabble in poetry, maybe fiction, but in that class something clicked. We read James Baldwin and Joan Didion and more contemporary books like Nickel and Dimed, My Misspent Youth, all of which were mind-blowing to me back then. I remember thinking, “Holy shit, this is what nonfiction can do? This is what an essay can do?” Around the same time I lucked my way into a gig writing features for Madison’s alt-weekly, Isthmus, and they gave me carte blanche to write about what I wanted. I dug into local subcultures I was interested in or part of, like coffee shops (a relatively new phenomenon in that small midwestern city at the time, when I was working as a bartender and barista to pay my way through college) and the roller derby and BDSM scenes; I was part of those communities, or became part of them, not least to better write about them, and then ended up finding my own sense of community there. This kind of immersive journalism, or narrative nonfiction, using the personal experience as vehicle or lens while looking at something greater than the self—some idea or question or community or event or weird cultural phenomenon—is what I still love to do most, because it helps me listen better, and ask better questions. It helps me make sense of both my own experiences and ideas, and the complexities of the world.
How long did it take you to write Tomboyland? Did you know it was going to be an entire collection or did it just come together that way?
This book has been about ten years in the making. I wrote the oldest essay in the book, “Of a Moth,” in 2010, and the most recent pieces were drafted a few years ago. I take my time with essays (too much time, usually) and never really feel done with anything. As I worked on these essays, over time, I wasn’t sure what the connective tissue really was—I would just get kind of obsessed with an idea, or a question, or an event, and write into the obsession. It wasn’t until much more recently, a few years ago, that I started to understand I was writing about things like class, and the body, and violence, and gender and sexuality. I knew it was a book about the Midwest, and this ever-shifting idea of home, but it took a long time to understand how all of those threads were working together, and to start to shape the book such that those connective threads were pulled tighter, that these themes and questions rang out through the entire book.
What does your writing process look like? Did you keep a specific routine when writing these essays?
I’m a total creature of habit, so I try to keep as regular a routine as possible. For most of my life I’ve had 9-5 office jobs, and for the past year I haven’t, so I’ve had to build my own schedule in order to get anything done. In the past, I wrote in tiny bursts wherever I could claw out some space: in the mornings, at night, on the weekends. Now, I have a lot more time to write, which is an awesome turn of events. But I need to build structure for myself in order to stay focused and get the work done. For me, this means getting up relatively early, drinking a cup of coffee and reading a chapter or two of something—an essay collection, a novel, whatever it is I’m currently reading—then sitting down at my desk for an hour or two. Sometimes I can get in several hours at a time. But launching a book and starting a new teaching job (at UNC-Chapel Hill) has kind of disrupted that. These are the best kinds of disruptions, obviously, for which I’m incredibly grateful, but I’m working on building a new routine.
I'm curious if there is any advice for aspiring writers, something that helped you along your writing journey, or maybe something that you have just learned on your own, that you could share?
Every writer’s process is different, so honor yours—whatever it is—and practice it as much as possible. And don’t listen to anyone who tells you that you should be doing it differently. And this might sound pretty treacly, but I mean it: Don’t give up. There were so many times over the past ten, fifteen, years when I thought, “This is just not going to happen for me. I will never publish a book.” I faced a lot of rejection, and a lot of self-doubt, and sometimes came very close to quitting. But I kept writing, often in spite of myself, and I’m very glad I did.
What have you been reading or listening to during this time of self-isolation? Any recommendations?
I’ve been reading novels, mostly—essays are more often tied to work for me, and novels can offer something more of an immersion, or escape. I’m currently reading Raven Leilani’s Luster, and recently finished Boys of Alabama by Genevieve Hudson and The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel.
Listening: I actually just acquired my dad’s old Chevy, which I picked up from him in Wisconsin and drove back to New York. It’s a beast to park in Brooklyn, and it’s old enough that it doesn’t have an auxiliary hookup, so I can’t plug in my phone and listen to Spotify. But it does have a six-disc CD player. So I took a carboard box of old CDs from my parents’ house, and listened to a bunch of my old music for the thousand or so miles it took to get home: mostly nineties stuff like Green Day and Garbage, and early-aughts indie like the Postal Service, Neutral Milk Hotel, Arcade Fire—stuff I got into back in Madison, when I was buying used CDs from the independent bookstores in town. It was really fun to disappear into that kind of musical nostalgia, and think about all the places I drove around back home when I was first listening to that music—and to find myself still totally gutted by it (and yelling along very loudly with the windows down). I highly recommend it.
Melissa Faliveno is a writer, editor, and teacher whose debut essay collection, Tomboyland, is forthcoming in August 2020. The former senior editor of Poets & Writers Magazine, she was previously an editor at an independent nonfiction press and a features writer for Isthmus, an alternative weekly in Madison, Wisconsin. Her essays and interviews have appeared in Bitch, the Millions, Prairie Schooner, DIAGRAM, and Midwestern Gothic, among others, and received a notable selection in Best American Essays 2016. She teaches writing at Sarah Lawrence College.
