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

"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"--

About the author

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.

Product details

• Authors: Hala Alyan, Hala Alyan
• Publisher: Harper Collins
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 03.06.2025
• EAN: 9781982182588
• ISBN: 978-1-9821-8258-8
• No. of pages: 272
• Dimensions: 160 mm x 231 mm x 30 mm
• Weight: 408 g
• Subjects: Fiction > Narrative literature > Letters, diaries; Autobiography: general, Memoirs, FAMILY & RELATIONSHIPS / Parenting / Motherhood, FAMILY & RELATIONSHIPS / Prejudice, Child care & upbringing, Family & relationships, Advice on parenting, Ethnic groups and multicultural studies, Ethnic minorities & multicultural studies, Parenting: advice and issues, Relationships and families: advice and issues, Child care and upbringing: advice for parents, BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Memoirs, BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Asian & Asian American, BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Arab & Middle Eastern