I'll Tell You When I'm Home (a Memoir)

By (author) Alyan Hala
Short description/annotation:
One of TIME’s 100 Must-Read Books of 2025 and Electric Lit''s Best Nonfiction of 2025 The rich and deeply personal debut memoir of motherhood via surrogacy, by award-winning Palestinian-American poet and novelist Hala Alyan.
Description:

One of TIME’s 100 Must-Read Books of 2025 and Electric Lit''s Best Nonfiction of 2025

At first, Hala’s baby is the size of a poppyseed. Then a grain of rice, then a lime. After years of trying for a baby, Hala watches from afar as her daughter grows in the body of another woman, in another country.

Hala is not just awaiting news from the surrogate. She also holds her breath as Palestine and Lebanon, her estranged homelands, are under fire. She remembers family stories of grandmothers mapping their lives through a tangle of borders; of eradicated villages, invading armies and places of refuge that proved only temporary; of men who left, women who stayed, and the legacies passed down from one to another.

Stunningly lyrical and unflinchingly honest, I’ll Tell You When I’m Home is a powerful story of unravelling and becoming, of homelands lost and reimagined, and of the intimate ways we learn to make a life when the ground beneath us shifts.

Review quote:

''[A] gorgeous, lyrical memoir ... I’ll Tell You When I’m Home shows the power of even a single narrative to resist the deliberate erasure of a people and their homeland, the violence of colonisation.''

Review quote:

''Alyan’s poetic prose encapsulates miles in each sentence and paragraph; joyfully, revisiting a passage is another chance at uncovering a new gift. Her nonfiction narrative voice allows the poet in her to shine, especially as each chapter is told in a series of short glimpses weaving together past and present, the old and the new Hala. ... With I’ll Tell You When I’m Home, Alyan has created a record, a story to communicate with those departed and those new to life. In the process, her work is an antidote for others searching for a home they never asked to lose.''

Review quote:

‘A poignant exploration of her tumultuous path to parenthood, identity, and displacement … The memoir unfolds like the tale of Scheherazade from One Thousand and One Nights, where Hala becomes the ‘waiting woman,’ reckoning with all the truths of her life before stepping into motherhood … a stunning kaleidoscope of vignettes … More than a story of motherhood and exile, I’ll Tell You When I’m Home is a testimony of everything at once … a moving tribute to the strength of those forced from their homelands and ruthlessly exploited, as well as a celebration of women’s determination to survive and thrive.''

Biographical note:
Hala Alyan is a Palestinian-American writer and poet. Her novels include The Arsonists'' City and Salt Houses, winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the Arab American Book Award, and a Chautauqua Prize finalist. Her work has been published by The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Guardian and Guernica. She lives in Brooklyn, where she works as a clinical psychologist and professor at New York University.
Endorsement:

‘A roaring cyclone of memory and imagination and harrowing tribulation. Surrogacy as metaphor for exile. Exile not as a dream for a better life, but as concession, a begrudging necessity. Gaza, San Miguel, Beirut, New York, Damascus – traveling with Alyan’s prose is a thrill. I''ll Tell You When I''m Home feels as rich and supersaturated as contemporary consciousness itself I can’t stop talking about it.’

Endorsement:

‘I’ll Tell You When I’m Home is an exquisitely written and unforgettable memoir about what it means to live with the violence and theft of exile and o