The rich and deeply personal memoir by the award-winning Palestinian American poet and novelist whose experience of motherhood via surrogacy forces her to reckon with her own past, and the legacy of her family’s exile and displacement.
I’LL TELL YOU WHEN I’M HOME: A Memoir
by Hala Alyan
Avid Reader, June 2025
(via The Gernert Company)
After a decade of yearning for parenthood, years marked by miscarriage after miscarriage, Hala Alyan decides 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 myths: 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. Hala gathers the stories that are her legacy, which makes for emotionally charged, painstaking work, but now the stakes are higher: 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.
“A beautiful and intimate memoir of a life in the embrace of stories, Alyan weaves the fine threads of torn and fragmented lives into an irresistible, intergenerational tapestry. I was spellbound from the first page.”
—Naomi Klein, author of Doppelganger
Hala Alyan is the Palestinian-American author of the novels Salt Houses—winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the Arab American Book Award, and a finalist for the Chautauqua Prize—and The Arsonists’ City, a finalist for the Aspen Words Literary Prize. She is also the author of five highly acclaimed collections of poetry, including The Twenty-Ninth Year and The Moon That Turns You Back, both published by Ecco. Her work has been published by The New Yorker, The Academy of American Poets, The New York Times, The Guardian, and Guernica. She lives in Brooklyn with her family, where she works as a clinical psychologist and professor at New York University.
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