On weekends, when she was a child in small-town Wisconsin, Melissa Faliveno would wake before dawn and travel with her parents to roadside gas stations and rural convenience stores to tally every chocolate bar, loaf of bread, and pack of sugary peach rings. On top of their full-time jobs, her parents had an inventory business. “It was meant to be a way to reach financial independence,” Faliveno writes, “but it never turned out that way.” Her description of this work appears in “Meat and Potatoes,” an essay exploring midwestern food and BDSM, in her debut essay collection, Tomboyland. Faliveno’s brilliance lies in her ability to find meaningful connections between seemingly disparate topics. (When your safe word is “asparagus” and you’re a writer as gifted as Faliveno, you probably don’t need to think twice about linking food and BDSM.) In one of my favorite essays, “Of a Moth,” she finds intersections between the moths infesting her Brooklyn apartment and cultural assumptions about gender identity:
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