Hala Alyan on Calling Our Exiled Selves into the Room - Electric Literature

Hala Alyan on Calling Our Exiled Selves into the Room - Electric Literature

Hala Alyan’s debut memoir, I’ll Tell You When I’m Home, is a powerful story of survival, addiction, longing, and resistance. After years of trying to have a child, facing miscarriage after miscarriage, Alyan decides to use a surrogate. She frames the story of the pregnancy around the story of her life, as she looks to the past—at her family’s exile and displacement, at her childhood and adolescence, at her addiction and her marriage. As the baby…