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.
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