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.