I'll Tell You When I'm Home: A Memoir

I'll Tell You When I'm Home: A Memoir

LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD • AN NPR BOOK OF THE YEAR • ONE OF TIME ’S 100 MUST-READ BOOKS OF THE YEAR • AN ELECTRIC LITERATURE BEST NONFICTION BOOK OF THE YEAR • The rich and deeply personal debut memoir by award-winning Palestinian American poet and novelist Hala Alyan, whose experience of motherhood via surrogacy forces her to reckon with her own past, and the legacy of her family’s exile and displacement, all in the name of a new future. After a decade of yearning for parenthood, years marked by miscarriage after miscarriage, Hala Alyan makes the decision 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. Meanwhile, as the baby grows from the size of a poppyseed to a grain of rice, then a lime, and beyond, Hala gathers the stories that are her legacy, setting down the ones that confine, holding close those that liberate. It is 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. Hala Alyan is the 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 . 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. Month One Month One Your baby is the size of a grain of rice! Blood cells are taking shape and circulation will begin. The embryo is only two layers of cells, making it microscopic. But by the end of the month, a little poppy seed will already have grown. I dreamt of a lyrebird once, before I knew it existed. I was walking through an empty grocery store—that fluorescent lights find me even in dreams is the truest symptom of late-stage capitalism I can think of—and there was a strange shape at the end of the aisle. It looked like a shadow eating itself, some frenzy of smoke. As I got closer I saw it was a bird, a tail fanned out and trembling. The bird opened its beak and the sound of a siren emerged. I don’t tell Johnny about the pink lines right away. I wait until the first blood test. Then the second. The beta numbers, as they’re called, doubling. Then the third, one week later. Johnny travels early in the month and I hold those pink lines to myself. For two weeks, it’s my secret. It feels like an affair almost, something thrilling and a little sickening all at once. Perhaps I’d seen it before, some clip clinging to my memory like lint. But to my memory, it was years after the dream, watching a nature documentary with Johnny. On the screen, a dark bird hops and shakes, its feathers quivering. The voiceover tells us to listen. The bird can mimic the call of other birds, a perfect replication of sound. Later, I watch David Attenborough’s The Life of Birds . We are shown a lyrebird imitating the motor of the camera. An alarm. A chainsaw. Lyrebirds in captivity can mimic hammers, chains, even—in one famous instance—the human voice. There is a D. W. Winnicott quote: “It is a joy to be hidden, but a disaster not to be found.” This is the true devastation of exile. One hides, but is never found. The new country doesn’t care to find you. Often, it would rather not. For years, I’d learned a mimicry. The mimicry of the pivotal scene in movies, the turning point in sitcoms, the punchline, the second act, those two words: I’m pregnant . For years, I’d rehearse them. I’d turn the words in my mind like twin stones. Then I spoke them. I’d see the words glide across his face. I’d see