On Motherhood & Memory, Trauma & Survival with Author HALA ALYAN

On Motherhood & Memory, Trauma & Survival with Author HALA ALYAN

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Novelist · Poet · Psychologist HALA ALYAN
Author of I’ll Tell You When I’m Home: A Memoir

I want to live a life of consequence, and I want to live a life that has stakes in it because that means that things matter to you. I think, in some ways, this memoir was a project of sifting through and excavating the darkest hours, both for me and for the lineage and ancestry that I came from. I think the darkest hours were experienced by so many people I come from who have had to leave places they didn't want to leave. I live in exile and have been forced to leave behind houses, land, cities, and people. Oftentimes, this has happened more than once in a lifetime, so they have carried that trauma. Of course, it plays out intergenerationally in many different ways.

I think it's a time of fear. I don't think I'm alone in that. I am scared for people that I love. I am scared for people who are quite vulnerable. I worry for my students. I am concerned for the places that I feel are engaging in complicity because that will be such a heavy legacy to endure later on, how people, places, and entities comport themselves in moments like this. They will be remembered. There will always be people who remember it.

MARCIA DeSANCTIS - Author of “A Hard Place to Leave: Stories from a Restless Life"

MARCIA DeSANCTIS - Author of “A Hard Place to Leave: Stories from a Restless Life"

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Journalist, Essayist, Author of A Hard Place to Leave: Stories from a Restless Life
100 Places in France Every Woman Should Go

I started looking over the stories that I had done. I would say the majority of the essays were not really about travel. They were more about aging and marriage and memory and all of those things, but I did find in the travel essays those kernels of things that I wanted to explore - bigger kernels of things that were sort of scratching at me from the inside like a piece of sand in my pocket that was irritating me and that I wanted to explore. What I found was that the theme of coming and going, the theme of arrivals and departures, the theme of entrances and exits, and the theme of home and away seemed to repeat itself. I felt that whenever I was somewhere, there was always a tide home. And when I was home, there was always the urge for going. And so I just weeded out and weeded out and really wanted to keep this theme of home and away.

Marcia DeSanctis - Author of “A Hard Place to Leave: Stories from a Restless Life"

Marcia DeSanctis - Author of “A Hard Place to Leave: Stories from a Restless Life"

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Journalist, Essayist, Author of A Hard Place to Leave: Stories from a Restless Life
100 Places in France Every Woman Should Go

I started looking over the stories that I had done. I would say the majority of the essays were not really about travel. They were more about aging and marriage and memory and all of those things, but I did find in the travel essays those kernels of things that I wanted to explore - bigger kernels of things that were sort of scratching at me from the inside like a piece of sand in my pocket that was irritating me and that I wanted to explore. What I found was that the theme of coming and going, the theme of arrivals and departures, the theme of entrances and exits, and the theme of home and away seemed to repeat itself. I felt that whenever I was somewhere, there was always a tide home. And when I was home, there was always the urge for going. And so I just weeded out and weeded out and really wanted to keep this theme of home and away.

REBECCA WALKER

REBECCA WALKER

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Award-Winning Writer, Producer & Co-founder of Third Wave Fund

The idea of writing memoir is about listening carefully. The way to find a story or, at least the story that needs to be told is that moment that you’re writing is the emerges from a deep kind of inner listening and finding the memories that are charged that don’t want to leave that have a certain kind of energy to them and, if you listen to them, and you allow them to be born in the writing, you discover your own story because your story is basically made up of all the memories that continue to hold the charge for you. All the memories that are lodged in your mind that you’ve secreted away and when you can excavate that story and you can write it down, then you can make sense of it and you can understand why you’re living the way you’re living and why you feel the way you feel. And you can also decide to to release those memories so that you can have new memories that can define and can shape your life.