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 unravelling – 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, Suria, 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. 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 unravelling and becoming, of destruction and redemption, and of homelands lost and recreated.