LEILA FADEL, HOST:
Through fragments of history - memory, grief and hope - author and psychologist Hala Alyan braids together the story of her life and the start of another. The memoir is called "I'll Tell You When I'm Home." In it, Alyan writes of the exile of her Palestinian ancestors and her family's life of repeated displacement through force or war from Gaza, from Kuwait, from Lebanon. Her search for home is framed through Alyan's struggle to get pregnant, the many miscarriages and then a new life through surrogacy, a baby named Leila. Hala Alyan joins me now. Thank you for coming back on the program.
HALA ALYAN: Thank you so much for having me.
FADEL: Why were you taking stock in this moment and deciding to write the story of a life, your life?
ALYAN: Because I felt like my life was untenable as it was. Because I felt like I had been sleepwalking for several years and then looked around and saw that I was in the midst of infertility, in the midst of several miscarriages - that I was longing and longing for an experience that I wasn't sure was going to come. The pandemic had started, and I was somebody who had at that point done kind of what I thought were all the "correct" things, quote-unquote.
You know, I had gotten sober many years earlier. I had tackled an eating disorder. I had, I felt, dealt with, you know, different traumas that I had. I was, you know, successful by metrics of I taught, I was writing, I was doing all these different things. I had a private practice. And there was just - and I just could not separate what was happening in my life with what was happening in these places that I belonged to and that I came from.
FADEL: Your book, as you point out, is really this journey - trying to get pregnant, the many miscarriages, the pain of being angry at your body and the ultimate decision that you make almost recklessly one night to seek surrogacy. Just talk to me about that moment you made the decision.
ALYAN: Yeah. I had just done the D&C, which is a procedure to essentially take care of pregnancies that are not going to be able to continue, for the final miscarriage, which was the hardest because it was the one where there had been a heartbeat and I'd heard it and it was OK, and then it started to slow and then there was no heartbeat.
I come home. And I was still - you know, like, I had just done anesthesia. I was, like, kind of groggy and whatever. And just before I could even really think, I mean, process what I was doing, I emailed. So I had contacted a surrogacy agency months earlier, and I just wrote them and was like, I'm ready to go.
FADEL: What was it like for you not to carry yourself? I mean, you write a lot about your body and this journey.
ALYAN: I began the surrogacy process, and then as the months went on, I started to understand the implications. So meaning, like, you know, the first time the baby moved to be like, oh, I'm hearing a description of this, right? I'm hearing the heartbeat through the phone. I'm hearing about the baby moving. I'm hearing about the cravings.
I think pregnancy notoriously is like a period of waiting and taking stock. But in my case, it was waiting for something to happen in someone else's body. And that tension started to really echo for me a lot of the metaphors of, like, exile and displacement and what it felt to be kind of - yeah, to be a little bit locked out of the experience while also being kind of breathlessly grateful that it was still happening.
FADEL: You call the book "I'll Tell You When I'm home." The title, where did it come from, and did you ever get home?
ALYAN: You know, I think motherhood has felt very much like a kind of home for me. And I've been very grateful for that because, you know, I wanted very badly to be a mother. But wanting something is not a guarantee that you'll enjoy it or you'll love it. It's one of the underdiscussed things about the human experience. And so I feel particularly grateful that when it arrived, I have loved it. I mean, maybe it's because I'm also solo parenting, but I think there's a profound way in which I feel like I am day to day, like, architecting this with this little human.
FADEL: And you end the book with Leila's birth. Tell me what that was like.
ALYAN: I had rehearsed also in my mind for years the moment of birthing. You know, I don't know that I would say I was looking forward to it, but I had certainly thought of, like, what it would be like, you know, to feel, to have to face that, you know? And then to be like, oh, in all my rehearsal of life looking one way, this is one of the few times that it never even occurred to me to rehearse this. And, like, nothing is more beautiful than to show up to your life unrehearsed. And that's exactly what that moment was.
FADEL: Nothing is more beautiful than to show up in your life unrehearsed. I love that. There is a passage near the end of your book on Page 252. Do you mind reading that passage?
ALYAN: (Reading) In you is the story of sailors, occupiers, the occupied, the people who never left, the people who were made to. You will learn to live within this, as we all do. You come from people that love the way moons pull tides or else the way that tides are pulled by the moon, and someday you will have to reckon with your own unruly heart. I have no advice to give save one thing - don't exile anything. Turn the sun of your attention briefly, sometimes briefly, on all that awakens your love. This is your birthright, Leila. You will have to hunt for many things, excavate them in others or yourself, but not your mother's truth. I'll leave that right in the open for you to see.
FADEL: You're a few years into parenting.
ALYAN: Yeah, three.
FADEL: How would you describe the mother you are?
ALYAN: You know, shockingly, like, laid-back, actually.
FADEL: (Laughter).
ALYAN: I have a very close friend that was like, I am - she's, like, you might be the most, like, calm and unanxious parent I've seen. You know, when you pursue something like surrogacy, there is maybe no greater act than trust. By the time she came into the world, I had had to practice that muscle. And so I feel more trusting now of the world than I did before her.
FADEL: Hala Alyan's latest book is a memoir. It's called "I'll Tell You When I'm Home." Thank you so much and congratulations on your book.
ALYAN: Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it.
(SOUNDBITE OF EMILE MOSSERI'S "JACOB AND THE STONE") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
