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

by Hala Alyan

After suffering miscarriage after punishing miscarriage—”how many times does a person need to get pregnant to get pregnant?”—the Palestinian American poet Hala Alyan decides to have a child by surrogate, and must wait as her baby grows in the body of another woman in another country. As she does, she finds herself reckoning with her family’s displacement from their homeland: “Surrogacy as metaphor for rescue. Surrogacy as metaphor for exile.”