Some books read like sutures—tender and brutal all at once, stitching the ruptures of exile, womanhood, and memory into something whole. Hala Alyan’s I’ll Tell You When I’m Home is exactly that: a memoir written from the hollowed center of longing, a raw meditation on wanting a child while reckoning with what it means to have lost a homeland.

Structured through the months of her child’s development in a surrogate’s womb, Alyan charts a terrain where infertility, sobriety, diaspora, and fractured marriage converge. She writes, “I was an almost-mother,” situating herself in that liminal space of not-quite and no-longer, where waiting becomes both the act of love and the architecture of grief. From Gaza to Syria, from Beirut to Brooklyn, Alyan gathers the shards of generational memory—what has been bombed, buried, forgotten—and asks what it means to pass on stories in the aftermath of so much erasure.

Her prose is searing and incantatory, pulsing with metaphor and repetition that mimic the circular ache of trauma. In Hala’s hands, womanhood is a choreography of wanting and waiting; home is something you build from the wreckage of assimilation and the ashes of imperial violence. Addiction, miscarriage, divorce, and diaspora aren't separate traumas but interwoven threads in the story of one woman's becoming. The book doesn’t romanticize survival—it honors the mess of it.

This is not a quiet memoir. Alyan writes motherhood through surrogacy without apology, refusing to sanitize its hunger or heartbreak. She resists the tidy narratives we’re handed about womanhood—what it should look like, what it should cost—and instead offers something raw, ruptured, and luminous with truth. Her grief for Palestine is no backdrop; it is the bone-deep drumbeat of the text. Every page aches with what has been stolen, what cannot be reclaimed, and yet what must still be remembered. “What is a story that forgets its origins?” she asks—and in doing so, insists that memory is an act of resistance, and grief, a form of love.

This book will resonate deeply with anyone who’s lived in the borderlands of identity, who has searched for a home in their body, lineage, or longing. For those told to keep their pain quiet, Alyan offers a counterspell: the truth is worth telling, even if it trembles. I’ll Tell You When I’m Home is one of the most powerful memoirs I’ve read in years—an offering to the diasporic, the motherless, the almost-mothers, the survivors, the storytellers. Thank you, Hala, for this book. I won’t soon forget it.

📖 Read this if you love: raw, lyrical memoirs of diaspora and identity; stories of surrogacy, motherhood, and grief; intimate explorations of displacement and cultural inheritance. 

🔑 Key Themes: Loss and Belonging, Surrogacy and Womanhood, Palestinian Diaspora and Generational Memory, Trauma and Resilience, The Politics of Home and Inheritance.