I’ll Tell You When I’m Home

Hala Alyan

This reading group guide for I’ll Tell You When I’m Home includes an introduction, discussion questions, ideas for enhancing your book club, and a Q&A with author Hala Alyan. The suggested questions are intended to help your reading group find new and interesting angles and topics for your discussion. We hope that these ideas will enrich your conversation and increase your enjoyment of the book.

Introduction

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, and Lebanon; of eradicated villages and invading armies; of places of refuge that proved only temporary; of men who left and women who stayed; of the contradictions of her own Midwestern childhood followed by her adolescence in various Arab cities. It is emotionally charged, painstaking work, but now the stakes are higher. How should ancestors and future generations alike be honored in the midst of displacement? How can one impart love for those who are no longer here, for places one can no longer touch?

Topics & Questions for Discussion

1. Readers typically assume that the author of a memoir knows themself well. Alyan, however, argues that self-knowledge is not so easily attained. “Who we are” is not something that is given to us; it is something we inherit and create. What are some of the experiences and people who have shaped Alyan? Which ones did she have a say in, and which ones were imposed upon her?

2. Are there parts of herself that Alyan chooses not to share? Why might this be?

3. Why do you think that Alyan invokes the legend of Scheherazade? Does she face any threats as a storyteller herself? If so, how do they change the way she tells her story? Consider this line on page 128: “I’ve been forbidden to tell this story.”

4. After reading Alyan’s memoir, how well do you feel that you know her?

5. Who do you think Alyan is writing to?

6. How are the sections within each chapter organized? How was your reading experience affected by Alyan’s fragmentary style?

7. As a child, Alyan developed a habit of telling lies, and on page 144, she recalls asking her mother about it: “You didn’t lie before. Before what, I ask. But I know what she’s going to say. Before the invasion. Before those weeks leaving my father behind. Before America.” What about Alyan’s life in America might allow her to lie, or even make it necessary for her to do so?

8. After a long bender, Alyan calls her mom and tells her, “I think I need to stop drinking” (page 119). Then she reflects: “Speaking the words aloud invoked them, like naming a jinn.” Discuss the significance of this scene. Why does verbalization have this effect?

9. On page 247 Alyan writes, “The women in my family are beasts when it comes to love.” Which characters in this memoir love each other? How do they show it? Where is love absent?

10. Each experience gives rise to a corresponding type of language. On page 185, Alyan mentions that addiction recovery circles use language ridden with metaphors. Elsewhere, she references the New York Times’ language of war reportage (page 159), which differs from a poet’s descriptive language or the shocked silence of someone who experiences it on the ground. How would you describe Alyan’s language? What does it reveal about her point of view?

11. How do you think a poet’s version of history differs from a historian’s version?

12. Alyan argues that the act of storytelling is an act of self creation. How does she create herself along the course of her memoir? How do you think the process of storytelling changes her?

13. Alyan brings up some experiences that are pretty specific to her own background. Were these relatable to you in any way?

14. Consider the title, I’ll Tell You When I’m Home. How does it frame the stories contained within the book?

Enhance Your Book Club

1. Imagine you are Leila, Alyan’s daughter. Write a letter to your mother after having read her memoir. What thoughts come to mind?

2. Find a few of Alyan’s poems, read them out loud, and discuss them as a group.

3. Go on Google Maps and take a virtual “walking” tour of the places that Alyan brings up.

4. At one point Alyan writes, “I once tried to write a story about a woman who could only say one word: a single name” (page 181). Try your hand at writing the beginning of this story. Why might this character have been reduced to silence?

A Conversation with Hala Alyan

You write on page 61 that “to know an ending is to curse the telling.” And yet you cannot help but know how your own story ends and how your family ultimately fares (that is, up to the present moment). How did you contend with this paradox?

I’m still contending with it. I love a good secret, but I recognize its cost, both in life and in literary making. The writer knows so many things the reader doesn’t and that responsibility is enormous; at the same time, I like to think of it as bidirectional. The reader knows things the writer doesn’t, too. I’ve had my stories told back to me before, my poems, my themes. I’ve had questions in audiences that have completely stunned me into deep gratitude, at what I was being shown about my own self and work.

How did you go about researching your family history? Did you have to interview family members? If so, what was it like to talk to them in a professional capacity, as an author? Were any of them resistant to having their stories published?

It was very disorienting at times! Some family members were happy to disclose stories; others were extremely resistant. Others were no longer around. My father in particular ended up being the holder of most of the stories on his family’s side—I didn’t really have access to anyone else. I would just record the conversations and eventually both of us would forget about the recorder and just fall deep into conversation. It was actually unspeakably lovely to spend time together in that way.

Your memoir is filled with quotes from other books. Were you reading these while you were writing?

Yes! I read and listened to a ton of memoirs while I was working on this book. I was fascinated by how people took the clay of their life and shaped it into something coherent.

Besides the stories you heard from your family about Palestine, what other stories did you have access to when you were trying to understand your past? Are there any you wished you had? Are there any that you will be passing on to your daughter?

I did a lot of research, looking into primary and secondary sources. I’ve written a fair amount about Palestine in different genres, but the stakes felt different to be telling the story through the framework of my own family. I wish so deeply I had more access to archives in general: so many libraries and universities and so much research has been destroyed. I wish I had thought to ask my grandparents and elders for more stories. As for my daughter, she can have any story I have.

For a long time, you describe how your baby was just an idea. Then, once you heard her heartbeat and saw her spine, she became a real person to you. I was curious, given the way you compare surrogacy to the experience of living in exile, if you believe that there is a similar way of making revolution and invasion feel real—more real, that is, than an abstract headline or a dissociative fact taking place a world away. How so?

I believe so. Just as an idea can become a body through intimacy, so too does war or revolution become real through proximity. With surrogacy, I lived the paradox of feeling deeply connected to someone I could not physically carry or touch. That’s not so different from exile: being tethered to places or people that your body can’t be near. Revolution, like mothering, becomes real through the details, through the disruptions.

On page 205, you ask: “What is a story that is constantly being erased? How can you pass along what you know only in fragments?” Are there any memories—yours or your family’s—that are at risk of being permanently forgotten? How do you go about preserving them?

Much of that is an issue of systemic change: entities shouldn’t be destroying archives, libraries, universities; shouldn’t be targeting poets and journalists; and so forth. Under those conditions, the marginalized will always be grasping what they can. I’m more interested in what we could write and make if we had the abundance and expansion not to have to worry about our survival and that of our stories. Until then, I write and I read and I listen and I rage and I dream.

As a memoirist, what does it mean for you to tell the truth? How about as a parent? As a daughter?

I think I’m still figuring out what that means as a person, much less a memoirist. I think it means to be willing to sit with discomfort, to consistently recommit to meeting reality on its terms, to listen, to be humble. As a parent, I think it will have to include some degree of discretion, of not burdening. As a daughter, it has meant respecting that some stories aren’t mine to share (and perhaps even hear).

You are both a poet and a writer of prose. How do these two mediums differ for you? Why did you choose to write your memoir in prose?

I think I’d already written parts of the memoir in fiction and poetry (certainly in my last collection, The Moon That Turns You Back). But there was something about this particular story that kept asking to be told plainly, directly, without ornament, with a simple I. It was intimidating and overwhelming to do it, but once I started, I knew I’d found the form. It was easier for me to structure the story, to tell the truth of it, when I was more confessional, when I thought of it like catching a loved one up on my life.

What authors or artists are you inspired by? How have your literary influences changed throughout your life?

I think we seek what we need in terms of literary mentors or ancestors, so to speak, and that absolutely changes depending on the season or era we’re in. Lately, I’ve spent a lot of time reading and taking in work by Ingrid Rojas Contreras, Omar El Akkad, Sloane Crosley, Kali Fajardo-Anstine, Lisa Ko, Diana Khoi Nguyen, Ghassan Kanafani, Leslie Jamison, Fady Joudah, Melissa Febos, and Cathy Park Hong.

Is there a section or scene or sentence of this book of which you are especially proud?

I don’t know if pride is the emotion per se, but I definitely felt a sense of catharsis by the end of the “Month Five” chapter (pages 121 through 145), which has the “Bad Boyfriend” story. It was a story that had been quite censored and gatekept and obscured for so many years, and the stakes of telling it had always felt so high. Finally telling it as directly and truthfully as I could felt both transgressive and freeing. I’d hesitated about including that story but, in the end, it was connected to so many others, so I tried to infuse the telling with as much grace as possible.