Out now.
“I’ll Tell You When I’m Home is not a straightforward story, but neither is Hala Alyan’s. Told in hundreds of bite-sized segments that give her memoir the rhythm of her poetry, Alyan threads together 11 chapters, each organized by a month in the growth cycle of a fetus. (For example, “Month Three: Your baby has fingers and toes,” and “Month Seven: Your baby is the size of a coconut.”) These passages provide entry points for Alyan to organize—and attempt to make sense of—her ancestral history; her frequent displacement throughout childhood; her relationships; her struggles with addiction, disordered eating, and sobriety; and, after multiple miscarriages, her journey to have a child via surrogate. ‘I have never not been Palestinian,’ she writes in one section. ‘That has never not been written upon my body.’ And it is in the writing about her body—its history, its travel, its desires, its pains, its othering, its future, its continuation in the tiny form of her child—that Alyan triumphs. This is a beautiful, soul-bearing book.”—LPP
