Zana’s Reviews > I'll Tell You When I'm Home: A Memoir > Status Update

"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...."

"My mother, who still believed her old life would be returned to her, any minute now, like a borrowed book someone had kept too long."

'One afternoon, a professor stopped me in the hallway and asked if I was okay.

“I just heard some things,” he said when I asked why. He glanced around him. “But you’re a nice girl, right.”'

Eww what 🤢

"Beirut then isn’t Beirut today. The girls who had sex were known by name. The boys talked. The girls talked even more. But mostly I wonder if he’d have felt a responsibility for what was to come. If the same cultural laws that would destroy me could have protected me. If he’d known, would he have felt the need to keep me out of the mouths of others, as the aunties say."

Nope

"They are all gone. The enormity of the losses, that lineage, the cascading matriarchs. Those smooth unlined hands. The questions I never asked. My grandparents, their cities. There are things only they could’ve taught a child, and now those things are gone too. The time is up. I have failed...."

"...I’d left Beirut promising Meimei I’d return. Instead, I stayed, choosing America, a white man, a life veneered with ease. I watched their illnesses from continents away, their disappearings, their deathbeds and burials missed. Their bodies fell and, in some weird way that felt prophetic, otherworldly, their cities fell too. My grandmother’s dementia echoed the wreckage of Syria...."

"Everything we had was lost, my mother would say of the invasion in Kuwait.

She meant the furniture, the clothes, my toys, all but a handful of photographs and pieces of jewelry. This refrain made me miserly with objects, a burgeoning klepto: everything could disappear and so everything became contraband."

"Nobody understood my grief over the dress. I’d wanted it saved as a memento, yes, but I really wanted it for the tulle itself. I wanted my sister to take it apart, reconstruct it; I wanted a daughter to find it and make it her own."