"Grief can give a body power, pare it down to recklessness. And there is something about life on the edges that allows a mind to cut both ways," writes Palestinian American author and translator Sarah Aziza in The Hollow Half: A Memoir of Bodies and Borders. Aziza brings readers through not just her history and struggle with anorexia, which almost ended her life, but how she connected to her family's past in the process. After her near-death experience, she began to consider more deeply her relationship to her late grandmother. Aziza links the layers of displacement, of how she whittled away self and identity in order to find a way to fit. She describes her path from "a mixed child not yet mixed up" to someone who pruned away half of herself to someone who found herself again in the excised stories of her ancestors, even tracing their steps through Gaza.
Aziza's captivating prose hums with loss, not just for her grandmother but also for all the lives her family, exiled from Palestine, might have once lived. Understanding the erasure of a people intertwines with Aziza's experiences of understanding her body. But even among deftly conveyed personal and geopolitical histories, she 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, freelance reviewer