The Hollow Half: A Memoir of Bodies and Borders

by Sarah Aziza

Overview

Finalist for the Palestine Book Awards

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 that brings both her ancestral and personal past into vivid presence. The hauntings begin in the hospital cafeteria, when a mysterious incident 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 violent 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 colonization, 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 the self and the world anew.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781646222445
Publisher:	Catapult
Publication date:	04/22/2025
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	400
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

SARAH AZIZA is a Palestinian American writer, translator, and artist with roots in ‘Ibdis and Deir al-Balah, Gaza. The recipient of a Fulbright fellowship and numerous grants from the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting, she has lived and worked in Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Jordan, South Africa, the West Bank, and 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, The Washington Post, The Intercept, The Rumpus, NPR, The Margins, and The Nation, among other publications.

Editorial Reviews

Finalist for the Palestine Book Awards
San Francisco Chronicle, A Best New Book
Elle, A Best New Book
Vulture, A Best Book of the Year
Write or Die Magazine, A Must Read Book
Named a Most Anticipated Book by Ms., Debutiful, Literary Hub, Electric Literature, The Millions, and RAWI

“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.” —Hannah Bae, San Francisco Chronicle

"A powerhouse of a memoir.” —Lauren Puckett-Pope, Elle

"With grace and rigor, [Aziza] examines an eating disorder alongside family history." —Keziah Weir, Vanity Fair

"A remarkable achievement, formally inventive, refreshingly honest, and politically sharp." —Isle McElroy, A Vulture Best Book of the Year

"Aziza took what a memoir can do and turned it on its head. She plays with style and genre, but also introduces the characters in her past and present with such originality. One of the best memoirs I’ve ever read." —Adam Vitcavage, Debutiful

“The Hollow Half is not simply a memoir; it is a meditation on rupture, a lyrical mapping of grief, longing, and the liminal spaces in-between. Told across the fault lines of language and geography, it traverses multiple selves and sites—Palestinian and American, daughter and witness, exile and return—without collapsing them into false unity. Instead, Aziza offers a form that honors fragmentation as its own kind of truth.” —Abdelrahman ElGendy, The Baffler

"As she tracks her movements through memory and dreaming, Aziza invokes the Palestinian poets Ghassan Kanafani and Mahmoud Darwish, as well as Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake . . . Brilliant and surprising, The Hollow Half conveys memory as a 'fight that accelerates your return.'”—mónica teresa ortiz, BookPage (starred review)

"A poetic and politically potent exploration of survival. Fans of Carmen Maria Machado and Rabih Alameddine will find much to admire." —Publishers Weekly

“Even among deftly conveyed personal and geopolitical histories, [Aziza] still writes in a voice soaked with hope; her journey is a gripping, powerful account of finding resilience in the face of destruction and trauma on a generational scale. The Hollow Half is a stunning testimony to what it might mean to continue to resist erasure, and to choose life even when it feels too hard.” —Michelle Anya Anjirbag, Shelf Awareness

"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." —Kirkus Reviews

"What is the vocabulary of loss? How much history can a body hold? Visceral, gutting, and stunning, The Hollow Half is one of those books that comes along only rarely. Sarah Aziza has found a way to make language an active witness to one woman's—and one nation's—insistence on life." —Maaza Mengiste, author of The Shadow King, shortlisted for the Booker Prize

"Excruciating, to live in a nation, a culture, a moment in which one must continuously insist upon their own humanity and the humanity of those they love. And yet, so many of history’s greatest writers—from Darwish to Morrison—have taken up this project, fractalling shards of unprecedented experience into something as vital, precious, undeniable, as life itself. Sarah Aziza sings herself into that chorus with clarity and tenderness, writing, 'Palestine: an orientation toward a life that names, and holds open, the ruptures loving makes.' The Hollow Half is inventive, propulsive testimony, a lush love letter to a place, a people, and the resilience of memory." —Kaveh Akbar, author of Martyr!

"How do we come to this life? Is it automatic, by birth? Or must we also choose it? Sarah Aziza's astonishing memoir is a record of a mystery of the self, a woman in the grip of a despair that has too many names or none at all, hiding as it seeks to erase her. To survive she must move towards being, as she says, 'ambushed by hope.' We travel with her into that place where even language abandoned her, and her effort to return, yes, alive, maybe even more than that, has lessons for us all. A blazing, hard-won triumph." —Alexander Chee, author of How to Write an Autobiographical Novel

"In the breathtaking, fiercely honest The Hollow Half, Sarah Aziza weaves a genre-bending memoir of body and land, an unflinching look at the tyranny of emotional, physical, and intrapsychic hunger. These hungerings—complex, visceral, ever-present—frame a story of hauntings, erasures, colonization, and the metaphor and reality of Palestine. But The Hollow Half is not merely a dissection of absence; it is an expansion of genre itself, gorgeously blending memoir with dreamwork, ancestral secrets with reclaimed history. Through stunning, transformative prose, Aziza writes both herself—and the reader—towards liberation." —Hala Alyan, author of The Moon That Turns You Back

“Sarah Aziza’s writing penetrates the heart and the pulse in such a way that you are breathing with her, rapturous against the fate of a body that cannot fully contain you, nor can it be contained. The Hollow Half is a potent and confronting memoir about the perils of our explicable ghosts—whether that be ancestral lineages or the unsatiated dreams of our ancestors or the yearning of something that can be never tasted or quenched—this book shakes you into understanding the devastation of what it means to be alive in a time like this.” —Fariha Róisín, author of Who Is Wellness For and Survival Takes A Wild Imagination

"If warring nations were to fall away what would be left but bodies? Sarah Aziza's The Hollow Half brings a Palestinian song and body back to life from the ruins. To sing this blood song she must cross all boundaries, between people, places, histories, and languages. Here is a heart beating, not beaten. The question is, how will we hold such a sacred text?" —Lidia Yuknavitch, author of The Chronology of Water

"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

From the Publisher

2025-01-17
Battling illness while excavating her family’s traumatic past.

In 2019, Palestinian American writer Aziza checked herself into a psychiatric ward in New York City in order to address a case of anorexia so severe that, at intake, her doctor told her that she was lucky to be alive. After successfully completing the treatment, she entered an outpatient program where she relapsed, months before the pandemic began. In the claustrophobia of lockdown, she felt trapped and panicked, depending on her husband for a level of support she struggled to accept. “I see myself anchored in my body,” she writes. “Locked inside a life I want to love but cannot understand.” Although quarantine made recovery feel impossible, it also gave Aziza time to explore her complex relationship with her deceased Palestinian grandmother, whom she called Sittoo, and the Gazan homeland that Sittoo was forced to flee long before the author was born. Between her childhood diaries, her father’s memories of his mother, her own memories of traveling and working in Palestine, and a short foray into psilocybin-aided therapy, Aziza pieces together the ancestral trauma that, combined with her gender, forms the psychological basis of her eating disorder. 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