Leslie Camhi
In Hala Alyan’s memoir, themes of exile, loss, and cultural heritage emerge alongside preparations for the arrival of a baby via surrogacy.
I’ll Tell You When I’m Home, by Hala Alyan,
Avid Reader Press, 257 pages, $28.99
• • •
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. The current unspeakable devastation in Gaza, where Alyan’s father was born, makes but a cameo appearance here. Instead, the writer rifles through decades of her own and her family’s history—conflicts and invasions followed by a lifetime of pit stops of varying duration in Kuwait City, Amman, Beirut, and Norman, Oklahoma—a private accounting that gathers urgency as she prepares for something new.
The change that she awaits, in the Brooklyn apartment she shares with her increasingly disaffected American husband, is the arrival of a baby, one she fervently desires. The promised appearance of this child (her first) will involve more border crossings as well as imaginative communion with a stranger. It will also raise specters of loss and inauthenticity—fraught legacies of an immigrant past that have long haunted her.
I’ll Tell You When I’m Home opens as the pandemic stretches into its second spring. We learn that, for the previous three years, the writer (then in her early thirties) had tried and failed to carry a pregnancy to term. She fills in a medical form—“Number of times pregnant. Five. Number of live births. Zero”—her answers a grim reckoning of miscarriages, concealing a world of pain. (Alyan’s sharp descriptions of her alienation from and desperate playing along with the male doctors charged with overseeing her reproductive health may provoke jolts of recognition in readers who have passed through similar trials.)
The effect of these losses on her husband—a man with deep New England roots and his own traumatic past—is difficult for her to measure. Still, with their marriage beginning to fray at the seams, she makes a decision. She contacts a surrogate agency, follows their instructions to recount in writing her “infertility journey,” and a short time later is matched with Dee, a young Canadian mother of two. Dee offers the couple an inestimable gift: she volunteers her body to carry an embryo conceived by them to term.
Alyan is the author of two novels, including Salt Houses—a prizewinning, polyphonic, multigenerational epic that unfolds across the modern Middle East—as well as five books of poetry. In her day job, she’s a clinical psychologist, a subject that she also teaches at New York University.
Yet all her industriousness, her compulsion to fix and mend, is rendered helpless before the limits of her anatomy. In her memoir, she recalls the aftermath of a blood test during her final pregnancy, before she turned to surrogacy: “my doctor’s voice excited. These numbers look so good, Hala, and I could feel my overachiever’s heart rise like bread.” But no deal.
The book’s central chapters are organized into months of gestation, with subheadings—“Month One: Your baby is the size of a grain of rice!”—written in the style of popular manuals for expectant mothers. These cheery exhortations to visualize the growth of the fetus jibe strangely with the experience that Alyan shares—long-distance and imaginatively—with Dee.
She’s tempted, at first, to make surrogacy a metaphor for, well, just about everything. Yet its resonance with the theme of exile feels inevitable. A borrowed womb in a foreign country will be her child’s first dwelling place. The bodily freedom this affords Alyan is edged with bitterness; she grows thinner, smokes minty cigarettes.
In Month Two, she and her husband argue. He heads to Mexico for a few weeks, “to give us space,” and the wolf of an old, familiar desperation returns to her—the fear of abandonment, and the threat of the self-destructive behaviors she had once used to cope with it. “When I think of the surrogate, the little almond of life in its amniotic sac, for the first time I don’t feel jealous. I feel grateful. Good. Keep the almond away from me.” For now.
Recent additions to the slender but growing bookshelf of pregnancy literature include novelist Torrey Peters’s Detransition, Baby—a comedy of manners about parenthood, trans life, and divorced women—and New York Times critic Amanda Hess’s Second Life: Having a Child in the Digital Age, a deep dive, based on the author’s experience, into the many ways that the internet is shifting the age-old endeavor of bearing human children.
In reading I’ll Tell You When I’m Home, I found it difficult to empathize with Alyan’s depiction of her husband, though whether this was the result of my general allergy to male obliviousness (born of long personal experience) or the narrator’s need to shield certain aspects of his biography, I cannot say. While the pregnancy Alyan describes is shared between three people (four, if one counts the baby-to-be), what fascinates in this memoir is Alyan’s own story.
The questions she poses are common to many prospective parents: What are my inner and outer resources, what elements of my past can I bring to the table to help me shoulder this looming, awesome responsibility? On the plus side, the larder of Alyan’s past includes fierce family love, an “oak tree” of a father, an intense matriarchy filled with mystical traditions, with dreams and their interpretation. There is Arabic poetry and storytelling, the hudhud bird that carries messages, and rich legacies of food and longing.
But there is also danger and flight, and, for her, the family’s eldest daughter, a near-constant effort at code-switching. Arriving in Oklahoma from Kuwait at age four, little Hala becomes “Holly” but learns to fulfill the exotic expectations of others, lying to a classmate, for example, about keeping a scorpion as a pet. When the family moves to Beirut, she is fourteen. “I had to sand my Arabic down, get rid of its rough Palestinian edges,” she writes. “I learned to carry the country in my mouth.” As a college student, left on her own in the still-divided and unstable city, she develops a serious drinking problem, blacking out repeatedly.
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 is an essayist, memoirist, and literary translator (from French), writing for the New Yorker, the New York Times, Vogue, and other publications. She is also a frequent contributor to art museum catalogs. Her first translation, of Violaine Huisman’s novel, The Book of Mother (Scribner), was a finalist for numerous awards and long-listed for the 2022 International Booker Prize.