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A Memoir of Bodies and Borders
by Sarah Aziza
A brush with death. An ancestral haunting. A century of family secrets. Sarah Aziza's searing, genre-bending memoir traces three generations of diasporic Palestinians from Gaza to the Midwest to New York City—and back.
"You were dead, Sarah, you were dead." In October 2019, Sarah Aziza, daughter and granddaughter of Gazan refugees, is narrowly saved after being hospitalized for an eating disorder. The doctors revive her body, but it is no simple thing to return to the land of the living. Aziza's crisis is a rupture which brings both her ancestral and personal past into vivid present. The hauntings begin in the hospital cafeteria, when a mysterious incident stirs the taste of Aziza's childhood, and summons the familiar voice of her deceased Palestinian grandmother.
In the months following, as she responds to a series of ghostly dreams, Aziza unearths family secrets that reveal the ways her own trauma and anorexia echo generations of Palestinian displacement and erasure—and how her fight to recover builds on a century of defiant survival and love. As she moves towards this legacy, Aziza learns to resist the forces of occupation, denial, and patriarchy both within and outside her.
Weaving timelines, languages, geographies, and genres, The Hollow Half probes the contradictions and contingencies that create "nation" and "history." Blazing with honesty, urgency, and poetry, this stunning debut memoir is a fearless call to imagine both self and world anew.
"Lyrical, vulnerable, and insightful, this formally inventive, deeply researched memoir masterfully weaves the author's struggle with anorexia with the history of her family and their multigenerational relationship with their Palestinian homeland. The author's description of her relationship with her husband is particularly poignant in its honesty and circumspection, providing a devastating picture of what it means to be sick around those we love. A graceful memoir about anorexia, family, and displacement." —Kirkus Reviews
"A beautiful and sobering memoir." —Booklist
"In breathtaking prose, Palestinian American journalist Sarah Aziza confronts the looming specter of death in various forms. She writes movingly about recovering from an eating disorder that nearly killed her and delves into her family's history and what it means to be the descendant of refugees from Gaza." —San Francisco Chronicle
"The Hollow Half is a shimmering testament to disciplined love's exigencies and transcendent possibilities. It is a book that all who seek a path beyond the brutal systems and narratives of colonial modernity will return to time and again." —Nadia Owusu, author of Aftershocks
"The Hollow Half catapults every single expectation we have ever had of the memoir genre, and the settled memory. Is it a memoir? It's at least that. But Aziza both longs for and accepts radical tradition and the aches of innovation. The book is body and spirit, full and famished. I'm not sure I've read a book more unafraid of finding free." —Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy
"In a world where 'survival requires a brief act of insanity,' Sarah Aziza has given us a miraculous clarity that is nothing short of catastrophic to a global order intent on paving over and dis-remembering Palestinians. Never have I read a book that has made me feel as loved, held, and cared for, in my Palestinian body, as The Hollow Half. Here is return translated, however im/permanently, into a kind of present tense. Here is a capacious dreaming, forming constellar kinship across, against, and despite borders in space-time, while never failing to return us to the body. This is a memoir we have all needed for many lifetimes." —George Abraham, author of Birthright and executive editor of Mizna
This information about The Hollow Half was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Sarah Aziza is a Palestinian-American writer, translator, and Fulbright fellow who splits her time between New York City and the Middle East. She has lived and worked in Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Jordan, South Africa, and the West Bank, in addition to the United States. Her award-winning journalism, poetry, essays, and experimental nonfiction have appeared in The New Yorker, The Baffler, Harper's Magazine, Mizna, Lux Magazine, The Intercept, The Rumpus, NPR, The Koukash Review, The Washington Post, The Asian American Writers' Workshop, and The Nation, among others.
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