I’ll Tell You When I’m Home: A Memoir

Palestinian American poet and novelist Alyan (The Moon That Turns You Back) chronicles the birth of her baby via surrogate in this erudite if opaque account. Alyan’s fervent desire to become a parent wasn’t shared by her husband, Johnny, a coder who disappeared to Mexico to “clear his head” soon after the surrogate got pregnant. As the couple’s embryo gestated, Alyan cycled through recollections of traumas both personal and cultural, which she catalogs here in fragmentary chapters organized by the phases of pregnancy. Subjects include the vastness of the Palestinian diaspora; the rootlessness of Alyan’s family, who fled Palestine for Kuwait, then Lebanon, Qatar, Oklahoma, and beyond; and a betrayal by Alyan’s teenage boyfriend that pushed her into into disordered eating, alcoholic blackouts, and pathological lying even as she trained as a psychotherapist. Throughout, the author deliberately blurs the personal and the political, reflecting on her maternal anxieties as she details familial and systemic dysfunction. Her consistent rejection of linear narrative and deliberate withholding of concrete biographical details, while artistically admirable, often proves more frustrating than edifying. It’s a lyrical and uncompromising personal history—sometimes to a fault. Agent: Michelle Tessler, Tessler Literary. (June)