Author of The Hollow Half
By Corinna Kloth
Blending memoir, history, and experiment, The Hollow Half resists easy categorization. Moving across time, borders, and generations, Sarah Aziza traces personal crisis alongside the inherited weight of exile, silence, and survival. In this conversation, she reflects on the book’s unconventional form, the role of memory and mystery, and what it means to write with both defiance and love.
The Hollow Half is not your typical memoir—it blurs time, geography, and even memory itself. For readers who haven’t picked it up yet, what is this book really about beneath its surface story?
SA: I am a firm believer that the reader ultimately finds and makes meaning through their individual experience, but I can share some of my intentions and reflections.
The blurring you mention was not something I intended from the outset—the particular structure of the book, which is both experimental and deliberate, emerged as I attempted to find a way to express what I was experiencing and coming to understand about my own body, life, and legacy. As I excavated history, I became convinced that time is far less linear than Western convention likes to suggest. I discovered that I couldn’t understand my personal story without recognizing the way past, present, and future are braided together—or perhaps it’s better to say they are overlapping, interrupting, informing and forming one another, always. The difference, for me, lay in becoming aware of that.
How I became aware of that is both explored in the book and enacted through the form the book itself takes. In the beginning of the story, I face mental and physical challenges that feel insurmountable, while at the same time being unconscious to the way these struggles are informed by the intermingled timelines and geographies that make me who I am. But, as I began to learn how to “listen”—to my body, to my instinct, and eventually, to my art, what first felt like unmitigated chaos and confusion started to unfold into something more like understanding, more like grace. It taught me a different way to occupy my body, time, and space—and I tried to find a way to embody that in the book.
The book begins in a moment of personal crisis but soon expands into a multi-generational tale of exile, silence, and survival. Was there a single thread or image that first told you, this isn’t just my story, this is my family’s story too?
SA: This is a great question. I think I was resistant for a while to admit that the multi-generational threads were intertwined with my personal struggles. Terms like “intergenerational trauma” get thrown around a lot, and, just like “trauma” itself, it’s a word that is both profoundly necessary, and sometimes opaque. I didn’t want to use those words if I didn’t know what it meant to me in particular. I think I was also a little wary of attaching my story, which at the time I understood as a story of relative privilege, to the story of the two generations before me—they survived “real” catastrophes, like the Nakba, the war of 1967, and so much more. Who was I to link my experience so directly to theirs? Why couldn’t I, with all my supposed comfort in the diaspora, just “get it together”?
But there were definitely turning points, where the experiences of my relatives and ancestors leapt out of the archive and, like a tuning fork, rang out a note that undeniably matched the vibrations of my own story. There were resonances that were so profound, I finally began to see how deeply present, and active, this history was in my own flesh and daily living. Some of those turning points are described in the book—and the “Nakba” chapter is really about the culmination of this realization.
Your writing feels like it’s always reaching for something just out of reach—truth, memory, maybe even healing. When you were writing, did you ever feel like the act of putting words down was changing you in real time?
SA: I am glad you feel that this book gestures beyond what it grasps. That’s the posture I try to always have, in my living. Certainty is destructive. Narrative, even, can be destructive. There’s a lack of humility in needing to attach a fixed meaning to things, to attach too much language to the ineffable experiences of living. So I tried to make the reader feel the porousness I did—moments of clarity punctuated with the reverence or tragedy of not-knowing.
And yes, this did change me—in writing this book, I passed through many feelings, but one of the paramount emotions was awe. There is such mystery in a single life, a single moment in time—let alone the many I was trying to approach in The Hollow Half. But there was also a sense of intimacy within that mystery. As I meditated on these stories for months and years, I discovered I was being held. By my grandmother. By the ancestors. Eventually, I began to learn how to hold this mystery toward myself. The sense that the unfolding never ends.
These feelings together taught me a new way to define hope and safety. Not in certainty, but trust. Not that what will come will be good, but that there are capacities in us that we have not imagined yet. And that there are ways we can hold and be held. This continues to transform me.
There’s a lot of silence in this book—moments where what’s unsaid feels louder than what’s on the page. Were those silences deliberate, or did they arrive naturally as you wrote?
SA: Thank you for noticing this. Yes, silence is a very important theme in the book—and it is not, in my mind, a uniform concept. To me, there are many types of silence. There’s the silence of mental illness, repression and denial. The silence of the illegible, of mystery, the unknown. The silence of reverence and awe. The silence of deliberate opacity—the decision to withhold. I wanted to play with these different textures in the book—the first section is even called “Silence” as a nod to the state of extreme disassociation and separation which marked the opening period of the memoir. At that point, there are many gaps in my understanding of my condition, my self, and my history—gaps which the book begins to “flesh out.”
But even as the story and selves in the book move towards greater realization, I wanted to steer clear of too much exposition, too much presumption. As I said before, I’m very wary of certainty. That is not to say I don’t believe in “facts,” but rather, I wanted this text to be first and foremost a human text, which makes space for the way events can take on different, overlapping, and even contradictory textures depending on your vantage point or positionality. And, I wanted to respect the privacy of the people I describe in this book—to make clear that, while I worked for years to arrive at what I felt was a very true representation of my family members’ stories, I also defer to the fact that every soul, every life, ultimately exceeds the understanding. So, I left gaps on purpose, for readers to pour their imagination into. I wanted us all to feel a sense of awe over the grief or love or beauty or terror that the text alluded to, without over-inscribing it.
In other places, I withheld on purpose. Too often, marginalized groups are asked to explain themselves and their history/culture, to audition for compassion, to “humanize” themselves. In the history of colonialism, there’s been this assumption that the “other” should make themself perfectly legible. I wanted to resist that, too—hence, I withheld some precious details. I put some things in Arabic, as a sort of selective silence—only certain people will access those words and their meanings. Etc.
The book moves across continents, borders, and languages. If you had to choose one landscape that holds the heart of The Hollow Half, what place would it be—and why does it linger for you?
SA: I would have to say, the hills of Jordan, near the city of as-Salt, where I and my relatives would often drive to watch the sunset over Palestine. From those hilltops, you can see it—our homeland, its textures and beauty, its nearness, the way the land between us appears uninterrupted by the man-enforced borders that have so terrorized our people, and destroyed so much.
On many evenings, you can find many other families of Palestinian refugees around you, sitting or standing around, gazing out along with you. This is our collective horizon. It feels so close, you could almost touch it.
One day, we will.
This memoir doesn’t offer easy resolution, but it feels full of defiance and love. When readers close the final page, what do you hope is still echoing in their minds hours or even days later?
SA: Well, I really like the sentiments you named. Defiance and love. I also hope they’d feel a new/renewed sense of reverence for the interconnectedness of lives, lands, and histories. Above all, I hope this love and interconnectedness propels them towards the conviction that a different world can’t wait. The same system that erases Palestinians also grinds so many other bodies into brokenness, disempowerment, death. But if love is truly what drives us, there is real, collective power available to us, to break into something new.
If you could describe The Hollow Half as a feeling—not a plotline, not a theme, just an emotion—what feeling would you give your readers before they even open it?
SA: Hauntings. Plural.
This term has negative connotations, but in my book—it’s more complicated, and more capacious, than that.
The book grapples with questions of inheritance—what we’re given, what we lose, what we choose to carry. Was there a single story from your family’s history that completely shifted the way you understood yourself while writing this book?
SA: Yes—but I would rather leave it up to the readers to experience it in the text. It’s toward the end of the “Nakba” chapter. It’s told in the form of a verbatim transcription from my father. More than any other story, it made palpable to me the weight of what has happened to us. It was a revelation to realize the burdens I couldn’t name had an origin that long preceded me.
This memoir feels like it pushes against the idea of what a book can be—footnotes, fragments, dreamscapes. Was there ever a moment you thought, I can’t write it this way, and what gave you permission to break the rules?
SA: Thank you so much for saying that—I did try to push against those conventions. But first, I definitely did need to give myself that permission! I think what helped was spending almost two years experimenting with form as a “personal project” before recognizing/admitting that I was writing a “book.” It gave me time to find the unique language of this book, and to hone some of the techniques I ended up using in the final version.
Once the idea of publication came into the equation, I felt a sudden sense of wariness. As if someone was going to come along and start enforcing the rules. . . And you know, my decisions did probably cost me some opportunities—mainstream publishers often like to play it safe—but aside from my initial hesitation, I never really questioned whether I would continue along my experimental path. Simply, I couldn’t imagine expressing the textures and layers of reality and thought I wanted to encompass, needed to convey, without expanding on traditional, more familiar Anglophone modes.
I’m grateful I found an agent and then an editor willing to believe in me. And now, I have something precious: the peace of mind knowing I wrote exactly the book I felt I needed to. I didn’t compromise—artistically or politically. (And there’s so much I could say about the way the mainstream market gatekeeps Palestinians, and pressures the few Palestinians they do publish to be polite, depoliticized, tokenized, etc. . .) At least for me, that’s far more valuable than any additional commercial success I might or might not have gained by playing it safe.
For readers who are just now hearing about The Hollow Half and wondering if this book will stay with them, what would you say to convince them to step into this story?
SA: I wouldn’t want to convince anyone to read the book, per se, but I would tell them—what I hear over and over again from people is that they’ve never read anything like it. Personally, that’s the kind of thing that would draw me in. Why not see for yourself?
The Hollow Half
Sarah Aziza
“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.
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Article originally Published in the Fall 2025 Issue.