July 8, 2025
Living With Fracture: A Conversation With Sarah Aziza
By Nic Wong
The Hollow Half is not simply a memoir of personal recovery or an account of Palestinian political history. It’s an exploration of fragmentation.
Stories about displacement and diaspora often broach familiar themes: straddling two worlds, overcoming rupture, stitching the self back together across the chasm of languages and borders. Sarah Aziza’s debut book, The Hollow Half: A Memoir of Bodies and Borders, offers a striking alternative to this pattern.
The memoir chronicles Aziza’s life-threatening struggle with anorexia and its entanglement with intergenerational trauma and the Palestinian history of dispossession, exile, and erasure. As she confronts her eating disorder, Aziza becomes a student of her lineage. Lessons from her grandmother, a refugee from Gaza, and the Palestinian legacy of love and sumud—steadfastness—offer the keys to resisting the disease in herself and the global maladies of colonization, patriarchy, and marginalization.
