After five poetry collections and two novels, Hala Alyan displays is applying her mastery of language to yet another genre. I’ll Tell You When I’m Home is a startlingly honest, lyric memoir that explores the act of mothering across multiple generations, and the unexpected factors that compound into making a life.
I'll Tell You When I'm Home marks your first foray into nonfiction. Why did a memoir feel like the right form for this story?
I’ve never written anything that, in its final product, so little resembled the intention. This book was initially sold as a book of essays. As time went on, my editor and I struggled with finding a connective tissue for the book. The individual essays were working on their own, but there was nothing that was really binding them. We ended up doing the thing that you advise writing students not to do, which is to write about things as they were happening. My editor finally said, “I think you're telling the same story over and over in different ways, but you're shying away from the narrative story.”
I've never had to write myself in and out of the dark as much as I have in this book. We came to the structure—from preconception through pregnancy—when my daughter was a few months old. There was no real distance. There can be a problem with that, process and content wise, but for this project, it worked because everything being excavated had roots in these larger things anyway. The story of displacement and exile—when you think about my grandparents in Falasteen, that was connected to the story of exile and displacement that I was feeling in my body. Everything ended up tying together. I've never fumbled through a project as much as this one. I've never regretted starting something as much as this one. As so often happens in life, when it was done, it felt so cathartic.
Can you say more about that regret?
It was a feeling that popped up sometimes, that I'm not ready to tell the story. The cognitive reframe that then happened was, well, you don't have to be ready to tell the story, because some future version of you is going to tell a different story about this time. Then, there was a freedom in it. I sometimes want narrative perfection or cleanliness. I talk about this a lot in the book, where towards the end, I didn't know what was going to happen to my marriage—I'm currently going through a divorce, so it turned out, spoiler, it did not work out—but I remember wanting an ending that's expansive enough that it encompasses any possible future. But that's just not possible.
What was your relationship to surrogacy prior to pursuing that path? Especially considering the taboo against alternate forms of having children.
When I first brought surrogacy up, after miscarriage two or something, I remember both my parents saying, “But you just started trying.” When the miscarriage numbers started climbing, my dad said, “I think maybe it's time to stop doing this to yourself.” I didn't need permission, but it was wonderful to have. It is taboo. Culturally, it's not the norm. I would say it's not the norm in the U.S, either. Aside from, like, a few celebrity cases, I didn't know anybody who had done it. Maybe there was a blessing in that. It was just me and this other person doing this thing. Not to make everything transactional, but emotionally, financially, spiritually, everything—it’s an un-repayable act. It's very strange to be on the other end of that.
The book is as much about mothering as it is a narrative of addiction and recovery. What are other texts on addiction you spent time with?
The Recovering by Leslie Jameson. She writes about how there's never a tidy ending with an addict—you're not like, “And then I stopped. Goodbye.” I'm realizing how much narrative messiness is a theme in the book, and resisting it. Because that is one of the things with relapse, right? Wanting to be done with the thing, and then it shows up at your door, like, oh, okay, this is something that's going to be a part of my life. Even if it's not an active addiction, it's just part of you.
How are you settling into motherhood now?
I will often say the greatest blessing of my life is that I really wanted a child and that I was able to have a child, alhamdulillah. But I actually think that that sentiment needs to be amended: the greatest blessing in my life is that I had a child and I love mothering and I love parenting. What is really under-discussed when it comes to infertility is the fact that you strive and strive for something, but you don't know any more than a person who does not have to undertake an alternative path to parenthood whether you'll be good at it, whether you'll enjoy it, what regrets you'll have. It’s been such a blessing.
