Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the eARC! This book will be published in the US on April 22, 2025 by Catapult.

Sarah Aziza’s The Hollow Half is an unpeeling, a revealing, a rebirth. It is an excavation of hunger—not just for food, but for identity, for history, for wholeness. Aziza writes with an unflinching gaze, dissecting the line between living and dying, exploring how each can masquerade as the other. At its core, this memoir is about anorexia, but it is just as much about intergenerational trauma, exile, and the weight of assimilation.

Aziza’s illness peaks during the first year of her marriage, a time when she obsessively curates her image online while her husband monitors her pulse as she sleeps. At 5’10” and 82 pounds, she is given an ultimatum: treatment or death. Yet, within the sterile walls of the eating disorder ward, Aziza finds herself suffocated by the behavioral modification techniques that reduce recovery to numbers—calories, pounds, intake forms. She exposes the rigid surveillance and loss of autonomy inherent in mainstream eating disorder treatment, questioning the assumption that such illnesses belong only to rich, white women.

But the roots of her disorder run deeper. In the hollow spaces where hunger festers, Aziza unearths the buried history of her father’s Palestinian identity—an identity he tried to suppress in an effort to sell her the American dream. The ghost of her Sittoo, her grandmother, lingers throughout the book, whispering of Gaza, of refugee camps, of a homeland lost but never forgotten. Through her father’s retold stories, Aziza comes to understand her disorder as a form of self-erasure—of her race, her queerness, her very being. The weight of exile and assimilation presses against her ribs, manifests in her refusal to take up space.

The memoir is a study of language, too—of the words spoken and unspoken, of Arabic phrases that carry histories, of the silences that shape identity. Aziza investigates her childhood with a forensic tenderness, tracing her first moments of bodily discomfort to the judgmental gaze of white childhood friends who ridiculed her Sittoo’s eating habits. That shame, that quiet rejection of inheritance, becomes a fracture that deepens over time. In searching for Sittoo’s past, Aziza begins to reclaim herself.

Her prose moves like water, shifting between stark, clear-eyed realism and lush, melancholic lyricism. Time bends, memory unfurls, and the narrative pulses with both urgency and restraint. There is an ache in every sentence, a longing woven into every reflection. The result is hypnotic, a memoir that feels less like a telling and more like a haunting.

Ultimately, The Hollow Half is about survival—not just of the body, but of the self. It is about reclaiming a stolen birthright, about refusing disappearance. In the end, Aziza does not find healing within the confines of carceral psychiatry. She finds it in her father’s stories, in the land of her ancestors, in the act of remembering. This memoir is a testament to the power of recognition—to see oneself, in all one’s fullness, and to finally say: I exist.

📖 Recommended For: Readers drawn to lyrical, introspective memoirs that explore identity, diaspora, and survival; those interested in eating disorder narratives beyond the white, Western lens; fans of Hala Alyan, Emmeline Clein, and Carmen Maria Machado.

🔑 Key Themes: Intergenerational Trauma and Diaspora, Body and Self-Erasure, Cultural Inheritance and Belonging, The Power of Language and Storytelling.