I'll Tell You When I'm Home: A Memoir

(Hardback)

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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 unravelling 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, Suria, 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.

is a powerful story of unravelling and becoming, of destruction and redemption, and of homelands lost and recreated.

Reviews

A poignant exploration of her tumultuous path to parenthood, identity, and displacement The memoir unfolds like the tale of Scheherazade from One Thousand and One Nights, where Hala becomes the waiting woman, reckoning with all the truths of her life before stepping into motherhood a stunning kaleidoscope of vignettes More than a story of motherhood and exile, Ill Tell You When Im Home is a testimony of everything at once a moving tribute to the strength of those forced from their homelands and ruthlessly exploited, as well as a celebration of womens determination to survive and thrive.'

Author Bio

Hala Alyan is a Palestinian-American writer and poet. Her novels include The Arsonists' City and Salt Houses, winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the Arab American Book Award, and a Chautauqua Prize finalist. Her work has been published by The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Guardian and Guernica. She lives in Brooklyn, where she works as a clinical psychologist and professor at New York University.