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

by Hala Alyan

The rich and deeply personal debut memoir by an award-winning Palestinian American writer, whose experience of motherhood via surrogacy forces her to reckon with her own past, and the legacy of her family’s exile and displacement, shaping the stories that will build her future.

After a decade of yearning for a child, years marked by miscarriage after miscarriage, Hala Alyan makes the decision to use a surrogate. As her baby grows in the body of another woman, in another country, Hala finds her own life unraveling—her husband wants to leave; her mental health grows brittle; the city of her youth, Beirut, is collapsing. She turns to the stories of her family, of her grandmothers long gone, and maps their jagged paths from Palestine, Kuwait, Syria, Lebanon, summoning memories and tales of invading armies, midnight escapes across deserts, places of refuge that proved temporary. She recalls the contradictions of a Midwestern childhood and years spent throughout the Arab world; the identities she tried on like outfits; the stories of men who walked away and those of women who disappeared in less obvious ways; the decisions they’d all have to make again and again—what to take and what to leave behind.

Meanwhile, as the baby grows from the size of a poppyseed to that of a grain of rice, then a lime, and on and on, Hala gathers these stories that are her legacy, setting down the ones that no longer serve her, holding close those that will set her free. It is emotionally charged, painstaking work, but now the stakes are much larger, extending beyond her own existence. How does one impart love for people who are no longer here, for places that one cannot touch? How to become someone else’s home, someone else’s safe place, when home and safety have eluded you?

A stunningly lyrical, raw, and powerful quest for motherhood, selfhood, and peoplehood, I’ll Tell You When I’m Home is an indelible story of unraveling and becoming, of destruction and redemption, and of homelands lost and recreated.

Genres: Memoir, Nonfiction, Feminism, Biography Memoir, Audiobook, Middle East, Mental Health

272 pages, Hardcover

First published June 3, 2025

About the author

Hala Alyan was born in Carbondale, Illinois, and grew up in Kuwait, Oklahoma, Texas, Maine, and Lebanon. She earned a BA from the American University of Beirut and an MA from Columbia University. While completing her doctorate in clinical psychology from Rutgers University, she specialized in trauma and addiction work with various populations.

Her memoir, I'll Tell You When I'm Home is forthcoming from Simon & Schuster in June 2025.

She has published two novels, her debut Salt Houses (2017), is the winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the Arab American Book Award and a finalist for the Chautauqua Prize, and her second novel, The Arsonists' City (2021).

Alyan's poetry collections include Atrium (2012), winner of the 2013 Arab American Book Award in Poetry; Four Cities (2015); Hijra (2016), winner of the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry; The Twenty-Ninth Year (2019); and The Moon That Turns You Back (2024).

She co-edited the poetry anthology We Call to the Eye & the Night: Love Poems by Writers of Arab Heritage (2023) with poet Zeina Hashem Beck.

Alyan has also been awarded a Lannan Foundation fellowship and her poems have appeared in numerous journals and literary magazines including The New Yorker, The Academy of American Poets, Guernica, Jewish Currents,The New York Times Book Review, Prairie Schooner and Colorado Review.

Alyan is a Clinical Assistant Professor of Applied Psychology at NYU. She resides in Brooklyn with her family.

Reviews

[BookOfCinz · Rating 4 out of 5]

There is something about a poet who writes their first memoir, it always slaps. I am telling you there is a recipe here.

Hala Alyan talks about what it is like having pregnancy through surrogacy but it is way more than that. We read about her life, her parents life what it was like growing up in the Middle East and how she finds life currently.

I loved everything.

[Ghalia · Rating 5 out of 5]

ripped my heart out of my chest :)))))

[Angie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read and loved Hala Alyan's novel The Arsonist's City (and a handful of her poems). Her memoir is also beautifully written, but its structure leans more toward the fragmented nature of poetry than the linear narrative of her novels. The throughline is Alyan's infertility, miscarriages, and decision to have a child through surrogacy. The chapters are framed around the months of pregnancy. Woven throughout are Alyan's and her family's various moves: Palestine, Kuwait, Syria, Lebanon, Canada, and the U. S., with reflections on displacement, immigration, exile, and home. A former boyfriend and the ensuing hit to her reputation (and potential safety), her marriage, and sobriety are also major threads. I especially liked a section where Alyan takes narrative therapy and tries to tell aspects of her story in the third person, second person, etc. to test out how it affects her story.

[Lisa (NY)]

I listened to a couple of hours of this book before abandoning it. I love Alyan's lyrical writing and was mesmerized by her two novels. But I couldn't connect to the fragmented style of this memoir, centered around her infertility and hopeful motherhood with a surrogate, interspersed with memories of her past.

[lj · Rating 5 out of 5]

don’t really know how to articulate how amazing this book is. i love hala alyan so much and am so grateful to have discovered her work a year ago.

“the myth of scarcity is dismantled first by the daydream of abundance”

[Victor Phun · Rating 5 out of 5]

how do you move forward while harboring so much guilt and trauma and pain? by building and growing something new. hala writes the story of her life and family and people with so much verve and honesty it can be hard to take it all in, but it makes the conclusion of her story so much more life affirming.

free free palestine

[Dina]

i don’t really rate memoirs but this was stunning and emotional and heart wrenching; perfection. honest from Hala Alyan, as expected. i loved every bit

[Tina Loves To Read · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a Non-Fiction Memoir. I did enjoy most of this book, but I found that it jump around at times.

[Richard Gresham · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wow so good

[Shagufta · Rating 5 out of 5]

A triumph! An absolutely incredible book.

[Christina Li · Rating 5 out of 5]

no words for how incredible this book is

[Treesh · Rating 5 out of 5]

In senior year of college, I took a Chinese politics class where the professor (who was a relatively new dad) hosted a couple of dinners throughout the semester to get to know his students better. I attended one such dinner, and after 45 minutes of discussing Chinese politics, this one girl, completely deadpan, said, “do you wanna talk about your baby?” The professor seemed a little shocked and was like, “what?” And she was like, “well I feel like people with babies always wanna talk about them.” Then he looked around at the rest of us and was like, “…do you guys want me to talk about my baby…?” And we all were like, “YES,” and he was like, “okay” and then, “not to be cheesy, but I endorse it. A kid just unlocks a whole new intensity of emotions - the love, the fear, the worry. And you really gain an appreciation for your own parents. You look at them and you’re like, ‘you’ve loved me this much for this long?’”

So on the surface, Hala Aylan’s journey to motherhood has nothing to do with what my Chinese politics professor described (she’s an Arab woman struggling with addiction, a possible divorce, and the trauma of multiple displacements, and he’s an all-American white man who talked about how his great relationship w his wife made having a kid even better). The only commonality bn the two is the sheer force of emotion they both felt. Honestly sometimes that sheer force made this book feel a bit repetitive, but maybe that’s just form following function. Also her writing is just so good that I didn’t really mind.

I’ve been waffling a lot on whether to have kids. It seems kind of awful in so many ways (esp for the children these days). I don’t know if this book pushed me in either direction. But maybe it did remind me that I do think that the most important thing to me in life is to feel as much as possible - even when it’s terrifying.

[Rushnae Kabir · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the best book I’ve read this year, so far. A beautifully written, very moving memoir about grief, exile, motherhood and nations (and so much more!). I love how she uses surrogacy as a metaphor for exile.

I cried a lot of times while reading it.

[Summer · Rating 5 out of 5]

hala alyan forever :)

[Nina · Rating 4 out of 5]

Such an emotional memoir, beautiful!! I know it might feel all over the place for some people but I also think that that’s what it made it so genuine, cause that’s life at the end of the day - a constellation of all of our memories affecting us at different times and moments. Love Hala, my favorite author!!

[Bela · Rating 5 out of 5]

can’t recall how many times i’ve had to put the book down and cry on the train. extraordinary writer of just beautiful and sad and hopeful stories

[Judy Goldman · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love memoirs that judgmental readers might accuse of sounding too much like poetry. Hala Alyan is a poet, in fact, and her lyricism layers every page. I read this book slowly because I wanted to stop and think and take in her thoughts and experiences and phrasing -- just everything about the way she tells a story. Highly recommend.

[Sam Cheng · Rating 3 out of 5]

Alyan is a Palestinian American writer, poet, and clinical psychologist. Her memoir, I’ll Tell You When I’m Home, is ultimately a search for herself as she recounts her struggle with multiple miscarriages. The author structures her book with the months of a normal pregnancy, each chapter named Month x, the x as the subsequent numerical month. Within this framework, Alyan fills the chapters with autobiographical details about her relationship with her romantic partner (Johnny), search for a surrogate (D), trouble with alcohol and becoming sober, previous partners (most notably her first love who harassed her and her family after they stopped dating), and family’s movement from Beirut to Kuwait, America, the UAE, and Lebanon because of war and invasion. Her search for home, a dispossessed land, inevitably requires a search for oneself.

The author presents these topics in montage style: she edits the shorter shots to condense information, perhaps to communicate time’s passage, maybe to convey a larger narrative, and certainly to obfuscate the autobiographical details. Why she chooses this method is unclear to me: Should this replicate blacking out or self-destructive behavior when she used to drink? Does this stylistically support her knack for fibbing since her father left? The non-linear unfolding of significant cascading events, poetic-leaning writing (though less than Aziza’s The Hollow Half, which I note because a Palestinian American authored this memoir I recently finished), and somewhat blurred autobiography suggest the absence of resolution and create space for remaking—all fine things. If Alyan’s goal is to present an unfinished story of love, it reads that way.

I’m at about 2 stars with I’ll Tell You When I’m Home and round up to 2.5 for real-time reasons.

[Yazeed · Rating 5 out of 5]

“In you is the glittering Beirut pavement after rain. The ports of Boston. In you are both my grandmothers’ rebellious blood, following men, escaping wars, from one country to another, my mother’s leavings, my aunts’. The rage and humiliation and exile. In you is the harm and rejoicing and help of generations of women. In you live the people that made you. All of them. I wouldn’t give you another story even if I could, for this is the one that bore you, and it is heavy and dazzling and the truth.”

[Anika (Encyclopedia BritAnika) · Rating 4 out of 5]

I adored Salt Houses and was excited to see Hala Alyan had a memoir coming out.

Her memoir starts with speaking of the story of Scheherazade and that sort of sets the stage for this memoir. It’s vignettes and stories. Alyan is offering up the pieces and stories of her life in order to live another day, in order to achieve what she wanted so desperately, to become a mother. It can seem disjointed but I really enjoyed the sort of scattered frenetic story telling.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the review copy. I’ll Tell You When I’m Home is available now.

[Kyra · Rating 4 out of 5]

Magnificent ending—the last two chapters had me spellbound.

[Olivia Zerger · Rating 4 out of 5]

Shockingly honest

[Emily Heer · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love when good books quote my favourite books.

[Z · Rating 5 out of 5]

phenomenal. my favorite read of the year, potentially of all time.

[Julia · Rating 5 out of 5]

this was so beautiful hala alyan is a genius! tw for SA, alcoholism, anorexia +

[The Bookish Elf · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hala Alyan's memoir unfolds like a complex arabesque, weaving together threads of displacement, fertility struggles, and the weight of inherited stories that refuse to stay buried. Known for her acclaimed novels Salt Houses and The Arsonists' City, as well as her powerful poetry collections including The Twenty-Ninth Year and The Moon That Turns You Back, Alyan brings her signature lyrical prose to this deeply personal narrative about becoming a mother through surrogacy while grappling with her Palestinian-American identity and family legacy.

The memoir opens with the haunting image of two women—Siham and Fatima, Alyan's grandmothers—preparing to flee their homes in 1948, carrying with them the seeds of stories that would eventually bloom in their granddaughter's consciousness decades later. This temporal fluidity becomes the book's greatest strength, as Alyan masterfully collapses past and present, allowing her ancestors' voices to guide her through her own crisis of becoming.

The Architecture of Loss and Hope
Fertility as Metaphor for Displacement

Alyan's struggle with infertility becomes a powerful metaphor for the broader Palestinian experience of displacement and the search for home. Through five miscarriages and countless medical procedures, she captures the particular anguish of wanting to create life while carrying the weight of historical erasure. Her body becomes a contested territory, much like the lands her grandparents were forced to abandon.

The clinical language of fertility treatments—beta numbers, HCG levels, PGS-tested embryos—creates a stark counterpoint to the rich, sensory memories of her grandmothers' stories. This juxtaposition illuminates how different generations of Palestinian women have navigated the tension between survival and continuity, between loss and the desperate hope for regeneration.

Surrogacy as Ultimate Act of Trust

When Alyan decides to use a surrogate in Canada, the memoir takes on new dimensions of vulnerability and trust. Her relationship with Dee, the woman carrying her child, becomes a tender exploration of what it means to create family across boundaries of nation, class, and experience. Alyan handles this relationship with remarkable sensitivity, never appropriating Dee's experience while honestly examining her own complex feelings about watching someone else carry her biological daughter.

Language as Sanctuary and Battleground
The Weight of Multiple Names

Throughout the memoir, Alyan grapples with the multiplicity of her identity through the lens of names and language. Her childhood transformation from Hala to Holly in American classrooms becomes a microcosm of assimilation's costs. She writes with devastating clarity about the violence of this renaming, how it severed her from her linguistic inheritance while forcing her to perform American belonging.

The return to Arabic becomes an act of resistance and reclamation, particularly as she prepares to raise her daughter. Her determination to speak Arabic to baby Leila, despite her own linguistic rustiness, represents a refusal to let another generation slip away from their linguistic homeland.

Storytelling as Survival Mechanism

The Scheherazade framework that threads through the narrative isn't merely decorative—it's essential to understanding how Palestinian women have preserved their stories across generations of displacement. Alyan positions herself as both storyteller and audience, recognizing that her daughter will inherit these stories as her birthright, regardless of geographic distance from their origins.

The Complexity of Trauma and Healing
Addiction and Self-Destruction

Alyan's unflinching account of her drinking years in Beirut adds crucial depth to the memoir's exploration of inherited trauma. Her alcoholism becomes another form of displacement—this time from her own body and agency. The connection she draws between personal destruction and collective historical trauma never feels forced or overly neat; instead, it emerges organically from her honest examination of how pain travels through families and across generations.

Her eventual sobriety represents not just personal healing but a conscious choice to break cycles of self-harm that echo her family's larger story of survival against impossible odds.

Marriage as Another Site of Displacement

The portrayal of her relationship with Johnny offers perhaps the memoir's most nuanced exploration of how trauma shapes intimacy. Neither villain nor saint, Johnny becomes a complex figure representing both refuge and another form of exile. Their struggles with fertility, his periodic departures, and their eventual tentative reconciliation around their daughter's birth reflect the broader challenges of creating stability when your foundational experiences center on loss and departure.

Literary Craftsmanship and Cultural Authority
Prose Style and Structure

Alyan's prose carries the musical quality evident in her poetry, with sentences that expand and contract like breath. Her ability to shift between the immediate physical reality of medical procedures and the dreamlike quality of ancestral memory demonstrates sophisticated narrative control. The month-by-month structure following her surrogate's pregnancy provides welcome anchoring for a narrative that otherwise moves fluidly through time and space.

Cultural Authenticity and Representation

As a Palestinian-American writer, Alyan brings invaluable authenticity to representations of Arab-American experience. Her depiction of family dynamics, the weight of exile, and the particular challenges of maintaining cultural identity across generations feels genuine and unforced. She avoids both romanticizing her heritage and pathologizing the immigrant experience, instead offering a complex portrait of how identity forms and reforms across time and geography.

Critical Considerations
Pacing and Focus

While the memoir's temporal fluidity creates powerful resonances, it occasionally makes the narrative feel scattered. Some readers may find themselves wanting more sustained focus on particular storylines—whether the fertility journey, the family history, or the marriage dynamics—rather than the constant weaving between them.

Privilege and Access

Alyan's access to expensive fertility treatments and international surrogacy represents a particular form of privilege that she acknowledges but doesn't fully interrogate. While her pain and struggle are undeniably real, the memoir might have benefited from deeper engagement with how class and access shaped her reproductive choices.

Resolution and Catharsis

The memoir's ending, while beautiful, may feel somewhat neat for readers expecting the messiness of ongoing trauma and healing. Alyan's transformation into grateful mother and cultural inheritor, while earned through the narrative, occasionally threatens to package complex ongoing struggles too tidily.

A Lasting Contribution to Contemporary Memoir

I'll Tell You When I'm Home succeeds as both intimate family story and broader meditation on how displacement shapes identity across generations. Alyan's willingness to sit with complexity—refusing easy answers about trauma, healing, or cultural belonging—marks this as a mature and important contribution to contemporary memoir literature.

The book's greatest achievement lies in its demonstration that stories themselves can become home, that the act of gathering and retelling family narratives creates sanctuary even in the absence of geographic rootedness. For readers interested in Palestinian-American experience, fertility struggles, or the broader questions of how we inherit and transform family trauma, this memoir offers both devastating honesty and ultimate hope.

Alyan has created a work that honors both the weight of historical loss and the possibility of creating new forms of belonging. In doing so, she proves that sometimes the most radical act is not forgetting where you come from, but choosing what to carry forward.

[Jordan Douglass · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was beautifully written but it did jump around a lot for different timeliness. If you aren't paying attention, it could get confusing on which part of her life she is reflecting. The way she describes her life was very poetic. #GoodreadsGiveaway

[Simone · Rating 5 out of 5]

couldn't put it down. can't wait for this book to be out in the world.

[Martha S · Rating 3 out of 5]

Idk how to rate this. Incredibly raw and interesting but the writing style sometimes got in the way of the story telling for me.

[Michelle Tuite · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reading 2025
Book 170: I'll Tell You When I'm Home: A Memoir by Hala Alyan

Saw this memoir a few places before I listened on audio. I had no idea when I started the book that this was the same author as The Arsonists’ City, a book we read for book club and I rated 4.5⭐️.

Synopsis: The rich and deeply personal debut memoir by an award-winning Palestinian American writer, whose experience of motherhood via surrogacy forces her to reckon with her own past, and the legacy of her family’s exile and displacement, shaping the stories that will build her future.

Review: The infertility journey takes center stage in this memoir that is set up for each month of Hala’s surrogate's pregnancy. Enjoyed the narration of her deeply painful journey to be a mom, something she has wanted all her life. Hala also gives the reader all of her backstory as she waits and hopes for a baby to complete her. The only drawback for me was the back and forth in the timeline. Without the benefit of the physical book, there were points I had to rewind and relisten to catch what was happening. My rating 4⭐️