I'll Tell You When I'm Home - by Hala Alyan (Hardcover)

About the Book

"After a decade of yearning for parenthood, years marked by miscarriage after miscarriage, Hala Alyan makes the decision to use a surrogate. In this charged time, she turns to the archetype of the waiting woman--the Scheherazade who tells stories to ensure another dawn--to confront her own narratives of motherhood, love, and inheritance. As her baby grows in the body of another woman, in another country, Hala finds her own life unraveling: a husband who wants to leave; the cost of past traumas and addictions threatening to resurface; the city of her youth, Beirut, on the brink of crisis. She turns to family stories and communal myths: of grandmothers mapping their lives through Palestine, Kuwait, Syria, Lebanon; of eradicated villages and invading armies; of places of refuge that proved only temporary; of men that left and women that stayed; of the contradictions of her own Midwestern childhood, and adolescence in various Arab cities"--

Book Synopsis

The rich and deeply personal debut memoir by award-winning Palestinian American poet and novelist Hala Alyan, whose experience of motherhood via surrogacy forces her to reckon with her own past, and the legacy of her family's exile and displacement, all in the name of a new future.

After a decade of yearning for parenthood, years marked by miscarriage after miscarriage, Hala Alyan makes the decision to use a surrogate. In this charged time, she turns to the archetype of the waiting woman--the Scheherazade who tells stories to ensure another dawn--to confront her own narratives of motherhood, love, and inheritance.

As her baby grows in the body of another woman, in another country, Hala finds her own life unraveling--a husband who wants to leave; the cost of past traumas and addictions threatening to resurface; the city of her youth, Beirut, on the brink of crisis. She turns to family stories and communal myths: of grandmothers mapping their lives through Palestine, Kuwait, Syria, Lebanon; of eradicated villages and invading armies; of places of refuge that proved only temporary; of men that left and women that stayed; of the contradictions of her own Midwestern childhood, and adolescence in various Arab cities.

Meanwhile, as the baby grows from the size of a poppyseed to a grain of rice, then a lime, and beyond, Hala gathers the stories that are her legacy, setting down the ones that confine, holding close those that liberate. It is emotionally charged, painstaking work, but now the stakes are higher: how to honor ancestors and future generations alike in the midst of displacement? How to impart love for those who are no longer here, for places one can no longer touch?

A stunningly lyrical and brutally honest quest for motherhood, selfhood, and peoplehood, I'll Tell You When I'm Home is a powerful story of unraveling and becoming, of destruction and redemption, and of homelands lost and recreated.

Review Quotes

"Gorgeous, lyrical . . . . [Alyan's memoir] examines with a poet's precision the many ways in which storytelling is rooted in matriarchy, carrying messages between mothers and daughters as a means of survival. . . . In such scenes of compelling intimacy, the author's narrative gifts shine through, the brief fragments making for quick, propulsive reading. . . . I'll Tell You When I'm Home shows the power of even a single narrative to resist the deliberate erasure of a people and their homeland, the violence of colonization." --The New York Times Book Review

"A story of the violence of exile over generations, a profound desire for motherhood, as well as surrogacy, addiction and the importance of remembering. . . . A rumination on the nature of memoir and the often impossible attempts to reclaim and understand one's past. . . . A story of war and loss--of country, but also of friends, lovers and ultimately her marriage. . . . Her memoir is a series of vignettes that go back and forth in time, in a writing style that is frantic, questioning and lyrical, designed to help the reader enter the darkest corners with the writer, almost inside her consciousness." --The Guardian

"A candid, intimate and tenderly written portrait of reckoning and restoration." --Ms. Magazine

"[A] lyrical memoir that explores the trauma of fractured identity." --Los Angeles Times

"Alyan's poetic prose encapsulates miles in each sentence and paragraph; joyfully, revisiting a passage is another chance at uncovering a new gift. Her nonfiction narrative voice allows the poet in her to shine, especially as each chapter is told in a series of short glimpses weaving together past and present, the old and the new Hala. . . . With I'll Tell You When I'm Home, Alyan has created a record, a story to communicate with those departed and those new to life. In the process, her work is an antidote for others searching for a home they never asked to lose." --The Chicago Review of Books

"A beautiful and intimate memoir of a life in the embrace of stories, Alyan weaves the fine threads of torn and fragmented lives into an irresistible, intergenerational tapestry. I was spellbound from the first page." --Naomi Klein, author of Doppelganger

"A roaring cyclone of memory and imagination and harrowing tribulation. Surrogacy as metaphor for exile. Exile not as a dream for a better life, but as concession, a begrudging necessity. Gaza, San Miguel, Beirut, New York, Damascus--traveling with Alyan's prose is a thrill. I'll Tell You When I'm Home feels as rich and supersaturated as contemporary consciousness itself--I can't stop talking about it." --Kaveh Akbar, author of Martyr!

"In this vibrant, poetic memoir, Alyan unpacks her difficult journey to motherhood and many facets of her past. . . The in-betweenness of Alyan's existence and the particular challenges and legacies of her diaspora identity combine with a writer's continual remaking of herself. A poignant exploration of suffering and wonder and a portrait of a woman on the cusp of bringing a new life to her world." --Booklist

"A powerful, magnificently haunting memoir from a writer I always want to read. It's great luck to live in a time when Hala Alyan is writing. Get ready to be astonished." --R. O. Kwon, author of Exhibit

"Gorgeously written and compelling, I'll Tell You When I'm Home connects the threads of personal and family histories as its author prepares for motherhood. Hala Alyan is a writer of astounding talent." --Lisa Ko, author of Memory Piece

"This memoir of pregnancy loss and surrogacy is frantic, intimate, brutal, tender and beautiful. Over the arc of a pregnancy by surrogate, the poet offers up her fragmented heartbreak and kaleidoscopic life. I kept gasping, wanting to close in around Hala, to protect her across time and space from the sharp edges of mother-need inside a body that cannot birth a living baby. She wants her readers in the wound with her, inside the stories that don't get told enough, inside the body-mind of a displaced woman struggling to create something bigger than herself. Brilliant." --adrienne maree brown, author of Loving Corrections

"Hala Alyan writes with sinew and tender force as she masterfully braids the delicate filaments that make a self--body, home, labor, loss--in such a way that the reader can never again disentangle them. This book is a gift, an offering of abundant beauty, full of deep insight into the intricacies of motherhood." --Alexandra Kleeman, author of You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine

"An exquisitely written and unforgettable memoir about what it means to live with the violence and theft of exile and one woman's devotion to restoring her daughter's inheritance through the power of narrative." --Nadia Owusu, author of Aftershocks

"An intimate experience. . . [and] emotion-packed exploration of the impact of loss on identity." --Kirkus Reviews

"I'll Tell You When I'm Home is a startlingly honest, lyric memoir that explores the act of mothering across multiple generations, and the unexpected factors that compound into making a life." --Publishers Weekly

"With lyrical prose, Alyan describes how in her time of crisis, she turns to the stories from her Palestinian family's past to anchor her in the present moment." --BookRiot

"The memory of past wars, their imprint on the personalities of the people swept up in them, and the slow festering of unhealed wounds help shape the psychological landscape of Palestinian American author Hala Alyan's moving, kaleidoscopic memoir, I'll Tell You When I'm Home. . . . What fascinates in this memoir is Alyan's own story. . . Her hard-won sobriety, her professional accomplishments, and the life she has built in the US still leave her wondering: What of all this will her child inherit? In lieu of an answer, she offers up this book, a record of loss and hope." --4Columns

About the Author

Hala Alyan is the author of the novels Salt Houses--winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the Arab American Book Award, and a finalist for the Chautauqua Prize--and The Arsonists' City, a finalist for the Aspen Words Literary Prize. She is also the author of five highly acclaimed collections of poetry, including The Twenty-Ninth Year and The Moon That Turns You Back. Her work has been published by The New Yorker, The Academy of American Poets, The New York Times, The Guardian, and Guernica. She lives in Brooklyn with her family, where she works as a clinical psychologist and professor at New York University.