Review of The Hollow Half: A Memoir of Bodies and Borders by Sarah Aziza

*The Hollow Half: A Memoir of Bodies and Borders* by Sarah Aziza (2025). Published by Catapult.

If you’re new here, and stumbled upon this blog through the mythical powers of the Internet, welcome! I know a lot of visitors to my website are people who randomly come upon this website through search engines like Google, but I also do have a lot of visitors who come back. Regardless: my name is Ashley, and I started this blog in order to keep track of everything I’m coming across in the world.

For three years I worked professionally as a film critic, and while going to all of the film festivals and interviewing directors and actors was cool for a while, but I wanted to reclaim my time and watch movies I wanted to watch. So I quit and decided to focus on this blog, and fell back more into literary criticism.

I also randomly fell into a period of unemployment because of unexpected circumstances, and I took a long and hard look at my finances and realized I had enough to take time off. I did end up doing that, traveled for a bit, applied to jobs, and found myself working on the blog now more than ever.

Because my income during this time was so limited, I had to be careful about where and how I spent my money. I’ve always been such a huge fan and advocate for public libraries, as when I was a child, my mother took us every week. People always get confused as to how I read over a hundred books a year, but it began when I was a child and I’ve largely done the same thing every single year for most of my life.

As I was unemployed, I went to the library every single week. I used their Kanopy subscription and access to The New York Times, checked out DVDs, picked up all the new and wonderful releases I wanted to read throughout the weeks. That’s how I kept myself busy as I was job hunting, which took forever because of the declining economy.

I was at my library when I discovered a copy of The Hollow Half. I had not heard of the book or of Aziza before picking this book up, but I was sold on this memoir as soon as I read the full synopsis on the inside book jacket. I ended up reading all of this in one sitting, as I was really invested in her story and what she had to say.

Let’s get into the review! I don’t want to keep rambling in the introduction, as I know this isn’t the main part of the post.

Aziza’s memoir on her eating disorder, mixed heritage, and experiences as a Palestianian-American.

This is a memoir that has multiple threads to it. One of the biggest threads, and a driving force of the narrative, is her experience with her eating disorder. If you can’t read about eating disorders and are triggered be extensive discussion on it, you might want to take your time with this book or sit back and wait a bit, healing, before touching it.

The current day threads are of her experience with anorexia and how she withered. She shows us how it hurt the people around her, especially her partner, and the denial that there was something wrong with her. Aziza did end up checking into a care facility, but even after going through the program and those struggles, she did relapse at home.

This is threaded in with her experiences and upbringing. We do learn some of the roots of her disordered thinking and where it came from in her childhood, but before that she discusses how her parents met. Her father was displaced from his village in Palestine because of the Nakba, and the trauma of this casts a shadow over their experiences.

Even in the country her grandmother settles in, Palestinians are not seen as actual citizens or residents of the country. They are literally seen as stateless people in many different ways, opening up ways to exploit and degrade the Palestinians who literally have nowhere else to go, as they’ve been expelled from their ancestral land.

Anyways: Aziza’s grandmother plays a prominent role early on in the narrative. This is when she would eat a lot, in typical Middle Eastern grandmother fashion (they feed you a lot!), and a stark contrast to what she would become later. Her father ended up coming to the US, leaving behind her grandmother and his family, and married her mother—a white American whose family could not understand why their daughter just married a Middle Easterner.

On a different note: Aziza even worked in Jordan and Palestine, doing a Fulbright in Jordan as well, and recalls her experiences trying to visit Palestine. Sometimes her efforts are successful, others she’s brutally and shamefully denied by the Israeli border soldiers who won’t let her in because she’s of Palestinian heritage.

I found Aziza’s approach to this to be very poetic, especially with the incorporation of the Arabic language. I was really impressed with the writing throughout this memoir, which is why I was so invested in the book and what she had to say about her story. I was having a really good time reading this, which feels weird to write because this is someone’s pain depicted on the page.

Overall Thoughts

If you couldn’t tell already from previous comments, I genuinely really enjoyed this memoir. The writing is truly fantastic, and although the actual content of the memoir could be triggering for some, I found relief in this. I struggled with my own disordered eating throughout high school and the beginning of college, and while it never got this bad, I know what it was like to look in the mirror and not realize there’s a problem.

I’ve healed and accepted my relationship with food, but reading this reminded me of that time in my life and I could see myself reflected in Aziza’s words. I’m not Palestinian, but I am Iranian and know the feeling of being displaced from my father’s culture and society because of war and systemic issues. I could also relate to some of the feelings she described there as well.

I do recommend this memoir in general! Check it out of your local library or purchase it at your indie bookstore if you’re interested in it. I think it’s worth giving a chance if it sounds like something you would read.

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