Hey, it's Empire's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbaugh. I'm in my mid-30s, and there's this

bleak joke among friends my age who have had or are maybe thinking about having a kid,

that we were also worried about accidental pregnancy when we were younger, right? How it was

drilled into us from sex ed classes, that it's extremely easy to get pregnant,

even if you were taking steps to prevent it, how you could slip on a banana peel and end up with a baby somehow.

And now that we're older and ready to have kids, it's not so easy at all.

Today's book is a memoir about how not easy the journey to parenthood can be.

It's titled, I'll Tell You When I'm Home by writer Hala Al-Yan.

And in this interview with NPR's Lila Faddle,

she talks about wanting so much to be a mother,

but learning that wanting is not necessarily a guarantee.

That's coming up.

In the U.S., national security news can feel far away from daily life.

Distant wars, murky conflicts, diplomacy behind closed doors on our new show, sources and methods.

NPR reporters on the ground bring you stories of real people helping you understand

why distant events matter here at home. Listen to sources and methods on the NPR app or wherever

you get your podcasts. Through fragments of history, memory, grief, and hope, author and

psychologist Hala Alian braids together the story of her life and the start of another. The memoir is called, I'll Tell You When I'm Home. In it, Alian writes of the exile of her Palestinian ancestors and her family's life of repeated displacement through force or war from Gaza, from Kuwait, from Lebanon.

Her search for home is framed through Alian's struggle to get pregnant, the many miscarriages,

and then a new life through surrogacy, a baby named Leila.

Hale Alian joins me now. Thank you for coming back on the program.

Thank you so much for having me.

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