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

by Hala Alyan

LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD • AN NPR BOOK OF THE YEAR • ONE OF TIME’S 100 MUST-READ BOOKS OF THE YEAR • AN ELECTRIC LITERATURE BEST NONFICTION BOOK OF THE YEAR • 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 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 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.

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

272 pages, Kindle Edition

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.

[Janelle · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautiful memoir about the authors path to motherhood via surrogacy, her Palestinian American identity, her family history, her addictive personality and relationships. Written in short sections, her ideas can jump all over the place but I found it a compelling read.

[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”

[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

[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

[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

[Violet Myles · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book unlocked a new experience for me in which I would read 5 pages and have to stop because I felt SICK with jealousy that I didn’t come up with those metaphors/similes.

[Claire Lauzon · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is exactly what I want out of a memoir!! Made me think about fertility, motherhood, and legacy in a new light.

[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!!

[Defne · Rating 5 out of 5]

Truly a stunning memoir. Beautiful and brave, wrestling so thoughtfully with mothering, diaspora, longing, addiction and, and, and… I can’t stop thinking about it already

[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 · 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.

[Sarah King · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the most beautiful and radically transparent memoirs I’ve read.

[Holly · Rating 3 out of 5]

A brutally honest memoir written in the most lyrical prose, almost felt like reading poetry. Took me a while to get into the flow of the writing but did enjoy it once I got there