The Hollow Half: A Memoir of Bodies and Borders

A raw, heartbreaking and powerful memoir by Palestinian-American author, Sarah Aziza about struggling with anorexia nervosa, trauma from displacement and identity. Sarah takes you by the hand, weaving timelines and languages, and talks about the fight of Palestine for justice. My heart breaks for the Palestinians who have endured so much but are still resilient.

I would want to read the book as I read and I find it intriguing that the author used space by placing certain lines on a single page which represents silence.

Thank you NetGalley, the publisher Dreamscape Media and the author Sarah Aziza who also narrates the audiobook, for the advanced complimentary copy. Opinions expressed in this review are completely my own.

I love, love, love this book. Memoirs can be a bit droning, but I found this engaging and great. The narrator did a wonderful job, I will be buying this as a hardbook to share.

I received an ARC of The Hollow Half: A Memoir of Bodies and Borders through NetGalley. Thanks to the publisher for granting me a copy in exchange for an honest review.

So I have a confession to make: I have spent a large portion of my life blissfully ignorant of the conflict between Palestine and Israel. Obviously, I understood their was a conflict, but a lot of what I knew of it was from the US media, which skews very pro-Israel. If you were to  believe the US media, you’d probably think that Palestineans were terrorists.

As time went on, it became clear to me that the Palestinian/Israeli conflict was more complicated than I was previously aware and that I needed to take some time to educate myself on the situation. I wanted to make more of an effort to understand the Palestinian perspective of what was going on; I don’t think it’s fair to ascribe the word “terrorist” to all Palestineans. 

All of this to say that one of the things that drew me to The Hollow Half: A Memoir of Bodies and Borders by Sarah Aziza is that Aziza is Palestinian American. I understood from the description of The Hollow Half that Aziza’s book would explore how her experience with anorexia echoes Palestinian displacement. 

Obviously, I didn’t expect to understand everything about Palestine based solely on reading The Hollow Half, but I was hoping to get some perspective.

I’m really grateful for the opportunity to experience The Hollow Half. Aziza is a journalist, and I thought she did a great job of weaving her journalistic skills into her own story. Her descriptions of her eating disorder were vivid and depicted the gravity of her illness. Weaving in stories of Palestine helped highlight the trauma her family experienced. 

As I mentioned, I listened to the audiobook, and I felt like this was the way to go. While The Hollow Half is not a translated work, Aziza does use some Arabic words and explains their meaning. As someone who doesn’t speak Arabic, I enjoyed hearing how the words sounded along with their meaning.

While working on this reiview, I took a look at some of the reviews on Goodreads. I came across one discussing how the reviewer thought Aziza’s book felt fragmented to the point of being disorienting. While I respect this person’s opinion, I’m not sure that I agree. I mean, yes, I can see how The Hollow Half can feel fragmented and/or disorienting, but I think that might be the point. I think that being displaced from your homeland and having your identity erased can be very disorienting - or at least, I imagine that it can be. Additionally, Aziza described how she often struggled to reconcile the white American and the Arab American parts of herself. I wonder if these were things she was trying to highlight in how she chose to write her story. 

One of the things that was kind of lost on me, probably because I listened to the audiobook, was the name of her romantic partner. Was she referring to him by the first letter of his name - C - or is his name pronounced in a way that sounds like the name of the letter (I hope that makes sense). I was wondering this because I’ve met someone whose first name is literally pronounced like the name of the letter, so I didn’t want to rule out the possibility of that being what was going on here. 

In any case, I felt like Aziza’s descriptions of her partner were somewhat idealized. I mean, I think it’s great that he stuck by Aziza through her illness. They clearly love each other. Great. I’m happy for them. But surely, he must have some faults, right?

Additionally, Aziza referred to herself as “queer” several times throughout The Hollow Half, but didn’t really go into much more detail. I would’ve been interested to know how her queer identity may have intersected with her Palestinian identity. 

All in all, a really fascinating read. I realize that I still have a lot to learn about Palestine, and that is something I plan on working on by seeking out more works by Palestinian authors.

I have only heard raves about this book and I do think it is likely a fantastic book but I had to DNF it about 25-30% of the way in because the detailed descriptions of her eating disorder were too much for me. I don't have an eating disorder but given the society we live in, a healthy relationship with food is hard to come by, and the book was giving me unhealthy thoughts. That's not on the author at all. I'd recommend the book if you don't have an ED.

The fragmented structure truly amplified the layered epistemic, historical, and political violence that undercuts the struggle of the self to think, remember, and exist under oppression, whether it is latent, as in the context of the diasporic US subjectivity, or unmitigated, as in the context of Palestine.

In Aziza’s memoir, The Hollow Half, the Palestinian American writer and translator brings together two areas in her life marked by an incomplete void. First, Aziza shares her struggle with anorexia nervosa since childhood, possibly motivated by her mother’s comments on food and body image. Aziza’s relationship with food continues into her adulthood, which leads to a stint in an inpatient rehabilitation center. After introducing her eating disorder, the author explicates, “One way to tell the story of a life: list the order and number of ways you learned you were unsafe. For me, girl came first, then Palestinian. Woman and queer were tangled together: one overdetermined; the other gagged. Each one of these words, a border. A frontier that told me: lose yourself or disappear.” As such, Aziza then focuses on Palestine’s regional history, the occupation, and the blockade as experienced by her family. She tells her grandmother’s story, which is mingled with guilt because she recalls feeling embarrassed as a child with an immigrant grandmother in a predominantly white town in America. Furthermore, Aziza threads information about international law, ethnic cleansing by Zionists, and colonialism as it appropriately falls into the timeline of her grandmother’s life.

Aziza’s timely memoir helps readers more tangibly grasp the Palestinian fight for belonging and justice. I understand why the author would pair her story about food and her body with her grandmother, grandmother’s journey as a refugee, and the larger fight to establish an independent Palestinian state—her eating disorder is a large part of her life, as is her Palestinian heritage. So, it’s not that I didn’t appreciate this part of the memoiring, but I wondered whether or not the two ideas consistently complemented each other. For this reason, I rate The Hollow Half 3.5 stars. Still, Aziza writes movingly with lush sentences and honors her family and people well.

My thanks to Dreamscape Media, Catapult, and NetGalley for an ARC. I shared this review on GoodReads on June 9, 2025 (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/7640366289).

While everything about Sarah Aziza’s The Hollow Half is stunning, I find myself in a rare position, I’m lost for words on how to describe it. Raw, emotive, powerful and heart breaking. A heart wrenching account of living with disordered eating, and a stunning love letter to Palestine, I was moved to tears more times than I could count. The latter chapters were a bit confusing, but I imagine they relate better in text. More an index of quotes and extracts, which are completely fitting they just confused me.

Narrated as beautifully as it’s written.

It’s funny that the books I rate the highest take all the words right out of mind.

All the stars 🌟
#Jorecommends

Huge thanks to Dreamscape Media via NetGalley for the opportunity to review this ALC 🎧

I got this as an audio arc on Netgalley and it has since come out. This was breathtakingly well written and narrated. The way it weaves a story about an eating disorder with the Palestinian roots the writer has, as well as generational trauma, queerness and disability. It moves flawlessly between those things and how they connect. An absolutely important read.

I found Sarah Aziza's memoir extremely moving. She has a beautiful and evocative way of describing her experiences. The audiobook was very well done, and I appreciated hearing Sarah Aziza narrate her own thoughts. Though her background is very different than my own, I am grateful for the opportunity to hear from her perspective. She grapples with the sense of divided identity between her Palestinian family and American identity. She also connects those identities with her struggle with an eating disordered. I really connected to Sarah Aziza's voice, and I would be very interested in picking up her work in the future. I strongly recommend this memoir to anyone interested in expanding their perspective of Arab Americans.

Content warnings: detailed discussion of an eating disorder.

Thank you to NetGalley and Dreamscape Media for providing an eALC in return for my honest thoughts.

this is an excellent and intense memoir to read, about eating disorders and love and family and displacement both in the US and from Palestine

This was so beautifully and poetically written. It felt more like listening to (I read this via the audiobook) someone reciting a really long poem than a memoir.

This was also a very unique way of telling this story and sharing this information that the author wanted to share. This isn't just a story of Palestine and the devastation of its people and of Gaza, this is the author's experience of seeing all of that happen through her own life. Sarah Aziza is half American and half Palestinian, raised in America and as a very white-passing person at that. She explains how she experienced racism and propaganda and watching how people displayed that towards her. Since she's white-passing, others had to come to terms with their own racism because she's "not like the others" and other sentiments like that. (AKA racism.)

But beyond Sarah dealing with racism and propaganda about the years upon years upon years of war on Palestine, Sarah dealt with an eating disorder. You see how she is not just dealing with one difficult thing, but many. And how the two are related.

I think that everyone needs to read this book, if you are pro-Palestine or pro-Israel. (Random tangent: this "war" isn't a religious thing, it is just Israel wanting something and the US wanting a foothold in the Middle East. Palestine has always had Jews living there, they are welcoming to Jews. Don't turn this into something it is not. Don't be anti-Semitic and don't be pro-genocide. Not to be childish about it, but why can't we all just get along?!)

This was a wonderfully human and heartbreaking account of this terrible, genocidal situation and how powerful propaganda is and how painful it is to witness that happen to your own committee. (But it doesn't have to happen to you for you to care, be human.)

Also, I love this cover, I think it's so pretty!

Thank you to NetGalley for the audiobook ARC of this book in exchange for my honest review! My Goodreads review is up and my TikTok (Zoe_Lipman) review will be up at the end of the month with my monthly reading wrap-up.

Oh, the review I've been dreading to write ... because every word that comes to mind to describe this story seems trite and insufficient.

The author takes us by the hand on a painful but deeply riveting and necessary exploration of identity, the self and the social and how these entwine and brush up against the constraints and ills of family and culture. I felt Palestine slipping away along with the author, caught up in anorexia and self-divestment and always braced for the everyday racism that peppers humanity wherever we are.

The writing moves between crisp and clinical, the style appropriate for the moment portrayed.

The narration was calm. The galley copy had a few hiccups that I expect will be corrected in the final version.

The Hollow Half

Is a poignant memoir told in beautiful prose exploring the many ways life can leave us feeling hollow. In Aziza’s case it’s her near death battle with anorexia, living in the diaspora, and the struggles to find one’s identity. This memoir is full of difficult truths as well as heartbreaking memories. Aziza’s story will stay with me; especially her grandmothers story. My heart truly breaks for the Palestinian people. They have and are enduring so much suffering, yet they are still so resilient.

I listened to this on audio and it was read by the author and it if you don’t speak Arabic I highly recommend you listening to this one. Aziza has sprinkled in Arabic lessons and it add such depth to this story. As always dreamscape media knocked it out of the park with the audio production of this memoir. I highly recommend, but as it deals with some heavy topics be sure to take care of yourself and check the trigger warnings ahead of time. Many thanks to the Dreamscape Media and NetGalley for a gifted copy in exchange for an honest review.