Hala Alyan’s debut memoir, I’ll Tell You When I’m Home, is a powerful story of survival, addiction, longing, and resistance. After years of trying to have a child, facing miscarriage after miscarriage, Alyan decides to use a surrogate. She frames the story of the pregnancy around the story of her life, as she looks to the past—at her family’s exile and displacement, at her childhood and adolescence, at her addiction and her marriage. As the baby grows inside another woman’s body, the chaos of Alyan’s own life grows as well.
I’ll Tell You When I’m Home spans generations, and in telling her story, Alyan embarks on an act of resistance in a time when Palestinian voices like hers are being suppressed and histories erased. This book therefore serves as more than just a memoir of Alyan’s life. It becomes a part of the larger narrative of Palestinian displacement and occupation, of home and belonging, and of the overarching struggle to survive.
We spoke over Zoom about what it means to be writing a story of survival framed around a new life coming into this world, the experience of having a book like this come out during an active genocide, and how this work, in Alyan’s words, is “adding to the archive.”
Deena ElGenaidi: At the beginning of the book, you talk about the story of Scheherazade and 1001 Nights and how she tells these stories to survive. There’s a line in your book where you say, “What stories would she have told if she wasn’t trying to survive, but live?” Would you say that your book is a story of survival or living?
Hala Alyan: I think, if I’m honest, this is one of survival. This story wasn’t even what I set out to write. I had sold a proposal for a collection of essays, and then life happened. The essays came, but they didn’t quite come as swiftly or as well-formed as I had hoped. There was a connective tissue missing, and then my editor suggested, “What would happen if you just started trying to tell the story of your life more straightforwardly?”
I’ve always been so afraid of the concept of memoir, and internally, there had been a lot of emotional gatekeeping around who has the right to tell a story. I’ve written fiction, I’ve written poetry, and I felt really comfortable with the fact that they have a cloak, and there’s a way to hide in them. There’s a way to structure things in [fiction and poetry] that I’ve always felt more comfortable with.
So then I was left in this really interesting position that writers rarely find themselves in: I was connected to a press, I was under contract, and in some ways had no idea what I was going to write. But in this case, it ended up being one of the most profound experiences I’ve ever had because it was like, okay, you can’t do any fancy narrative magic tricks here. You have to tell the story straightforwardly; you can’t hide behind a poetic eye. I just started to write the story of what had happened, at the time, in the last year of my life.
That’s the other thing—if you do the math, my daughter just turned three, so this was not a long time ago. I really was starting to write about her arrival very soon after she arrived. I was not even out of the year that I was describing when I was putting pen to paper with it, which was again a relief. Not necessarily a writing experience I recommend on an ongoing basis, but it was a very profound one.
DE: It sounds like it. Towards the end, you write that there is “no resolution,” which is not unlike Scheherazade’s stories and how they never end with a resolution. Could you talk about what it means for you and your story not to have a resolution?
HA: I think that’s one of the things that made me most resistant to trying to write this story. I would say to the editor—and to myself— that I don’t even know what happens yet. How am I going to write about this when I quite literally don’t even know how this plays out? The reason that the book ends at the postpartum is because it was really all I knew when I started writing that section. I didn’t know what it was going to be like to raise this new being in the first year of her life. I don’t know what’s going to happen to this marriage. I don’t know what’s going to happen to Palestine, to Lebanon. I have to end it on a cliffhanger for myself.
I’m somebody that loves endings. I mean, I don’t love them in real life, but I love them in a narrative. Many times I’ve written poems, or even a novel, where I knew the last scene before I even began. So to really be writing through the dark was unlike anything I’ve done before.
DE: Yeah, it sounds like a very different experience. Why did you choose to tell your life story using the pregnancy as the framing device?
HA: There’s two answers: there’s the honest, unglamorous answer, and then there’s a little bit more of a poetic one. The unglamorous answer is because everything else was failing. Everything else I was trying just wasn’t working. I was like, What about this? What about this? What about this? When I finally started to write this version, I was like, Oh, this is interesting. This seems to be landing in a way that I hadn’t quite expected.
Preparing for a life to be brought into the world is not dissimilar to knowing life is leaving the world.
The other part of it is, the reason it worked is because there was some truth to the fact that preparing for a life to be brought into the world is not dissimilar to knowing life is leaving the world. It’s a period of time where you take stock of your own mortality. Your history is spotlighted. You think, what kind of parent am I going to be? How am I going to care for them in literal ways but also, how am I going to show up for this task? What am I going to offer? What am I going to be able to leave a kid with? All these questions were so salient. In terms of the narrative, [the pregnancy framing] was the device that worked the best.
DE: There are a few moments in the book where your mother tells you not to tell certain stories, and she says she doesn’t want to be in the book. But you do tell those stories, and she is in your book. I know that’s something that a lot of memoirists struggle with, and I’m also Arab and Muslim, so I know what that culture is like when it comes to keeping things secret and keeping things in the family. How did you decide what stories were worth telling despite what your mom said? And were there things you left out because of your family’s wishes?
HA: Yeah, I mean, circle back in a couple months and I’ll tell you how it goes when my mom reads it. She’s still been like, “You better not have written about me,” and I’m like, “Listen, it’s going to be fine.”
At some point I was kind of put on a stories embargo by my mom because she started to directly assess that the reason I was asking for details about people in our family was because I wanted to get things narratively correct. And then she was just like, no more, I don’t get any more stories, which I think is such a funny withholding. In some ways it was an incredibly effective thing to withhold because I was like, What do I do now? I think there would have probably been more about some of these family histories in there, but some of it I just didn’t have access to.
But I do think that intuitively, I knew what I would not write about. It wasn’t just a matter of what I had access to and what I didn’t have access to. There are many stories that I could recite to you in my sleep that I just would not write. I wouldn’t do it because they’re not mine to tell. I’m being really careful not to write about things that, for the most part, didn’t happen to me. I had to have been somehow directly linked to it for it to feel like I had my own authorship or ownership over it.
DE: That makes sense. There’s also a lot of women in the story: mothers, grandmothers, aunts, and then eventually your daughter. Why the focus on these women, and can you talk about the significance of this lineage of women for the story?
HA: Yeah, that’s another thing that sort of emerged. The women are present in the book because they’re present in life. They take up just as much space in the story as they did in raising me, as they did in forming me, as they did in shaping the ways that I see things, in shaping what I fear, what I want, what I’ve longed for, what I’ve learned to desire, etc. They were incredibly salient forces for me.
The men were different. Even the absence of something can profoundly impact you. The men were there but in different ways. They impacted me in different ways, but the women—their influence—you could point to it so easily. You could feel it, you could breathe it, you could smell it, you could touch it. They were there the whole time.
We have different parts of ourselves, and oftentimes there’s a part that’s been exiled.
DE: You quote Joan Didion at one point, who said, “I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be,” and then you add, “I thought the future self was the powerful one, the one who had more control. It would take years to understand the past self could hijack the future more than the reverse.” What was the experience of going back and writing your past self like?
HA: It was really disorienting, actually. The implication of the Joan Didion quote is that we need to be on nodding terms with all of our past selves, in particular the ones we have exiled. We have different parts of ourselves, and oftentimes there’s a part that’s been exiled. There’s a part that we feel the least able to be in presence with—the one we’re the most afraid of calling into the room.
For me, that has a lot to do with the self that I held most viscerally when I was drinking. And for all the things that were hard to call upon, the idea of having to sort of time travel back to those years in Beirut and back to the self that was just so uncontained in her addiction, uncontained in her desire and her grief and her wanting and her inability to stop, was such a painful part of my history. It’s a self that I have a really, really hard time inviting to sit at the table.
You know, going back to childhood is painful for different reasons, or fleeing the invasion, or thinking of myself as a kid getting used to this country, etc. But there’s something about that self in particular that I was afraid of invoking because I was afraid she’d show up and make a mess. I had to sit with that: What exactly is the fear here, and what do you think of this part of yourself? And if she made an appearance, then what happens? This is a story of addiction and sobriety, but it is also a story of relapse, which is something that happens a few months before my daughter is born. It’s something that hadn’t happened in the previous almost decade.
In some ways, funny enough, the thing I had been afraid of did sort of happen. I had been thinking about, in that era, who I’d been and who I was going to be for my daughter. I was like, it’s important to go back and look at the archive and read the things you’ve written for yourself— letters and poems and things that happened during young adulthood. And in that time I relapsed. I was afraid if I called this thing into the room, it was going to cause havoc, and havoc was caused. There’s a lot of things that aren’t great about a relapse, but I think one of the beautiful things about a relapse in general is that you get to spend time briefly with a self that you have banished.
DE: The book also talks a lot about Palestine and about your family’s lineage and displacement. When you talk about being a Palestinian child nowhere near Palestine, one thing you write is, “You are trained from childhood on nostalgia.” What does it mean to be trained on nostalgia, and how does that affect you into adulthood?
HA: I mean, I think it fucks you up. I was trained to long for things that I had not touched and may never touch—and for things that may not be able to receive me, things that I may not be able to have access to. For me, it’s led to a lot of destructive stuff. If you belong to an identity that is continuously under threat of being destroyed, you learn how to destroy yourself in different ways. For me it manifested in drinking, it manifested in eating disorders, it manifested in codependency.
I struggle a lot with this idea of access and relational border crossing and border making, and what it means to lean in when you should be protecting yourself and walking away, and what it means when you’re not able to receive other people. I think I really struggle with the idea of receivability and what it is to cross thresholds emotionally.
DE: Could talk about the experience of having this book come out while there’s an ongoing genocide in Palestine? Did it affect your relationship to the story at all?
HA: Yeah, I remember fall of 2023, I was still editing, and I was editing into 2024. I just remember being like, What am I even telling here? Does this even matter? Do I just scrap this, or write towards this particular moment? But then I was also finding it extremely difficult to write about what was happening as well. It was very disorienting. There’s something so urgent and so unbearable about the moment that to be telling any story that isn’t that one and spotlighting anything else feels really cognitively dissonant. It feels really unnerving, actually, so I do think there’s a fair amount of dissociation for anybody within this community, or even allies, releasing any work into the world right now that isn’t just about this. I think we’re all experiencing a sense of not knowing if anything matters.
As long as Palestinians continue to exist, they are a threat to a prevailing narrative.
Then, there are certain moments at two in the morning where I feel like I can catch my breath for the first time all day, where I will be like, no, but these stories are a part of it. They are part of the devastation and destruction that is incredibly premeditated and meticulously planned out. It is not systems gone awry. It’s systems functioning exactly as they are intended to. Part of the target is to wipe out the archive and to wipe out stories—to wipe out literally any body or mouth that can take a breath and tell a part of what’s happening. In many ways that is the existential threat of Palestinians. As long as Palestinians continue to exist, and as long as any single Palestinian on this planet exists and takes a breath, they are a threat to a prevailing narrative. So what I’ll say to myself in those moments where I can catch my breath is, you’re adding to the archive.
