"Gorgeous, lyrical . . . . [Alyan's memoir] examines with a poet's precision the many ways in which storytelling is rooted in matriarchy, carrying messages between mothers and daughters as a means of survival. . . . In such scenes of compelling intimacy, the author's narrative gifts shine through, the brief fragments making for quick, propulsive reading. . . . 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 colonization." --Safiya Sinclair, The New York Times Book Review

"A story of the violence of exile over generations, a profound desire for motherhood, as well as surrogacy, addiction and the importance of remembering. . . . A rumination on the nature of memoir and the often impossible attempts to reclaim and understand one's past. . . . A story of war and loss--of country, but also of friends, lovers and ultimately her marriage. . . . Her memoir is a series of vignettes that go back and forth in time, in a writing style that is frantic, questioning and lyrical, designed to help the reader enter the darkest corners with the writer, almost inside her consciousness." --The Guardian

"A candid, intimate and tenderly written portrait of reckoning and restoration." --Ms. Magazine

"An affecting memoir . . . [that] bears the emotional weight of the events that preceded it: infertility, miscarriages, a strained marriage, and exile." --The New Yorker

"[A] lyrical memoir that explores the trauma of fractured identity." --Los Angeles Times

"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." --The Chicago Review of Books

"In her new memoir, poet and Dayton Literary Peace Prize-winning novelist Hala Alyan tells a story of telling stories. Moving from interrogations of Scheherazade's myth to reflections of family lineage and to the frustrations of conceiving with a surrogate, Alyan charts the complications of building a life in the midst of personal transformation. 'The thing about reinvention is it has, as its precondition, erasure, ' Alyan writes. 'Something needs to be erased to be replaced with a shinier, reinvented version.' Though a deeply personal act, reinvention is not entirely dictated by personal choice. It emerges through questioning the past, through the effort to hold on to fading relationships, through the construction of a family, through political impositions. Alyan confronts the countless ways we hide and expose ourselves, both as writers and people, in an effort to make sense of our lives. --Isle McElroy, Vulture ("Best Books of 2025 so far")

"A beautiful, soul-bearing book." --Elle

"An exquisite book about many things. . . . At its heart, I'll Tell You When I'm Home is an exploration of the art and act of storytelling itself: to bear witness, to locate that which has been lost, to heal and to wound. . . . Alyan also brings her considerable literary strengths as an award-winning poet and novelist to the memoir, imbuing the language with such ravishing beauty that the reader will resist moving too quickly through the book." --Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

"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

"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." --Kaveh Akbar, author of Martyr!

"In this vibrant, poetic memoir, Alyan unpacks her difficult journey to motherhood and many facets of her past. . . . The in-betweenness of Alyan's existence and the particular challenges and legacies of her diaspora identity combine with a writer's continual remaking of herself. A poignant exploration of suffering and wonder and a portrait of a woman on the cusp of bringing a new life to her world." --Booklist

"A powerful, magnificently haunting memoir from a writer I always want to read. It's great luck to live in a time when Hala Alyan is writing. Get ready to be astonished." --R. O. Kwon, author of Exhibit

"Gorgeously written and compelling, I'll Tell You When I'm Home connects the threads of personal and family histories as its author prepares for motherhood. Hala Alyan is a writer of astounding talent." --Lisa Ko, author of Memory Piece

"This memoir of pregnancy loss and surrogacy is frantic, intimate, brutal, tender and beautiful. Over the arc of a pregnancy by surrogate, the poet offers up her fragmented heartbreak and kaleidoscopic life. I kept gasping, wanting to close in around Hala, to protect her across time and space from the sharp edges of mother-need inside a body that cannot birth a living baby. She wants her readers in the wound with her, inside the stories that don't get told enough, inside the body-mind of a displaced woman struggling to create something bigger than herself. Brilliant." --adrienne maree brown, author of Loving Corrections

"Hala Alyan writes with sinew and tender force as she masterfully braids the delicate filaments that make a self--body, home, labor, loss--in such a way that the reader can never again disentangle them. This book is a gift, an offering of abundant beauty, full of deep insight into the intricacies of motherhood." --Alexandra Kleeman, author of You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine

"An exquisitely written and unforgettable memoir about what it means to live with the violence and theft of exile and one woman's devotion to restoring her daughter's inheritance through the power of narrative." --Nadia Owusu, author of Aftershocks

"The memory of past wars, their imprint on the personalities of the people swept up in them, and the slow festering of unhealed wounds help shape the psychological landscape of Palestinian American author Hala Alyan's moving, kaleidoscopic memoir, I'll Tell You When I'm Home. . . . What fascinates in this memoir is Alyan's own story. . . Her hard-won sobriety, her professional accomplishments, and the life she has built in the US still leave her wondering: What of all this will her child inherit? In lieu of an answer, she offers up this book, a record of loss and hope." --Leslie Camhi, 4Columns

"A smart, immersive, and life-affirming memoir set in the space between generations: those who have passed and those who aren't yet." --Eliana Ramage, Lit Hub

"In her lyrical and deeply personal memoir, Hala Alyan explores loss--both ancestral and immediate with tenderness and clarity. The book reflects on storytelling through mothers and daughters as a means of survival. The book's most poignant reckoning: how does one hold on to a Palestinian identity while living far from the land? The book addresses longing for motherhood, for a return to the Levantine homeland that shaped her family history. Alyan's writing doesn't offer easy answers; it gives voice to the ache and beauty of diasporic existence." --Vogue Arabia