THE HOLLOW HALF

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.