Our eighth annual look at the authors of some of the year’s best debut nonfiction features wide-ranging articles on heartfelt, striking, and inquisitive memoirs, essay collections, and hybrid nonfiction works. Sarah Aziza describes breaking a New Year’s resolution to never write again due to ancestral dreams that invigorated her, stirring her journalistic instincts. Erika J. Simpson details her journey as an acting student turned writer, and how the eventual passing of her mother, and all her many sacrifices and efforts during Erika’s childhood, lead her to a powerful story for a debut book. Julian Brave NoiseCat reflects on how a documentary film and living with his father helped reshape his multifaceted memoir. Amanda Hess explains her process of writing while pregnant and how the “mystical headspace” of early parenthood influenced her work. And Samina Najmi compares sculpting to writing personal essays, while also delving into what moving slowly toward her debut taught her. The New Nonfiction 2025 includes five individual and honest debut journeys that show the myriad ways a writer can arrive at telling the stories of themselves, their people, and, ultimately, the world around them. Najmi reminds us that “for nonfiction sculptors, the beauty that each of us carves out of the amorphous clays of a life is its own justification.”
The Hollow Half: A Memoir of Bodies and Borders (Catapult, April) by Sarah Aziza
This Is Your Mother (Scribner, May) by Erika J. Simpson
We Survived the Night (Knopf, October) by Julian Brave NoiseCat
Second Life: Having a Child in the Digital Age (Doubleday, May) by Amanda Hess
Sing Me a Circle: Love, Loss, and a Home in Time (Trio House Press, October) by Samina Najmi
The Hollow Half: A Memoir of Bodies and Borders (Catapult, April) by Sarah Aziza, a lyrical memoir where past and present, personal and political coalesce, as ancestral dreams bring one woman’s body and mind back to life, leading her to examine the survival of her people while reconfiguring her inner and outer worlds. Agent: Elias Altman of Massie McQuilkin & Altman. Editor: Alicia Kroell. First Lines: “My grandmother couldn’t read. She was a simple woman, my father would say after her death. Bowed with age and unnamed illness, she lived her final decades on hands and knees. Crawling, sputtering in a tight track between the sitting room, toilet, and kitchen.” (Author photo: Natasha Jahchan)
As the world greeted the year 2020, my New Year’s resolution was to never write again. I had just finished a four-month stint in a psychiatric hospital, undergoing treatment for severe anorexia. Before my admission I had been an up-and-coming journalist in denial about my failing health. Upon discharge I reentered the world at a “normal” weight, convinced I was insane. On the ward, my doctors had made grim predictions: Mine was “a long-standing illness,” a “mental malfunction” I might manage but would likely never fully overcome. I left the ward humiliated and promptly quit my job. The idea of writing—let alone publishing—felt like an invitation to further disgrace. I wanted silence, to disappear.
I was in the midst of hunting for a nonwriting job when the COVID-19 lockdown throttled New York City, driving millions into retreat. Soon I was fighting a losing battle against relapse, an agonizing déjà vu of my doctors’ prophecy. Then something else arrived: I began to have dreams of my deceased Palestinian grandmother. Vague yet shimmering echoes of a time long past, when Arabic and English, Palestine and America were equally real to me. My body responded instantly—I woke both invigorated and steadied, my disassociation briefly giving way to embodied presence.
I did not realize at first that I was breaking my vow. In the wake of the receding dreams, I moved instinctively to my desk. I was writing to extend the memories, re-creating them like rooms I could loiter inside. Soon these memories gave way to lacunae, the jarring recognition of how much I had forgotten or had never known. My journalistic instincts stirred. From our respective quarantines I exchanged voice notes with my father and uncles, mine full of questions and theirs brimming with memories of Gaza, of survival and wars. I pulled books from virtual shelves, laying official history alongside their personal narratives, knitting connective tissue in the form of prose.
During this almost two-year process, I worked in near-total secrecy. I was relearning how to see the world and, inadvertently, catching glimpses of myself. After a lifetime of imagining myself as an individual, I was recognizing my own story—of diaspora, denial, love, and so-called madness—enmeshed in a deep web of space and time. I experimented, seeking ways to reflect a multitemporal, multilingual, hybrid, and polyvocal reality. One in which anorexia and the ethnic cleansing of my family were intertwined, and the legacies of genocide and resistance were ongoing, both inside and outside my flesh.
After insistent encouragement from a friend, I queried agents. A handful expressed interest—if I promised to trim and tame the project or else inflate it into something more exotic and sensational. One agent, Elias Altman, was willing to join me as I wrote toward something else. In the spring of 2023 we sold The Hollow Half.
Mere months later the words Palestine and Gaza would make daily headlines, prompting a flood of publishing interest, but before then—when my manuscript was still on submission—we mostly received effusive rejections. Many of these letters praised the prose while explaining that the publisher “did not know how they would sell” such a book. Then came Alicia Kroell, an editor at Catapult, whose enthusiasm and faith made up for the rest. With them I continued writing and editing into the summer of 2024—through months of genocide and the loss of over two hundred relatives. Overwhelmed with grief, I had to ask for extra time, which my publisher granted without question. I turned in the final draft on the cusp of another New Year’s Eve. I would ring in the year 2025 in Palestine, in a West Bank refugee camp where the ground frequently shook from the force of Israeli bombs hitting Gaza and Lebanon. I would make no resolutions that night, only murmur a prayer.
An excerpt from The Hollow Half: A Memoir of Bodies and Borders
It was with his mother that Ziyad returned to Palestine. The Israelis, for reasons never given, had banned Musa for life. But by the time Ziyad reached sixteen, Horea was determined to visit home. As mother and son approached the border, she instructed him as he would one day instruct me: to be placid in the presence of soldiers. But when the border guard told him, You’re not Palestinian. You’re Gazan,* Ziyad snapped back without a pause.
No, I’m Palestinian.
No, you’re Gazan.
No . . .
Horea squeezed his shoulders. They crossed over with two bowed heads.
Nearly ten years had passed since Ziyad and Horea left Deir al-Balah, and their return reached my father like a flood. Tight joints softened in the familiar air, salt breeze a caress. Walking, their bodies traversed years, wavering between a gone time and what remained. Ziyad thrilled at every overheard voice, the shape of the Gazawiya dialect filling the air. He felt an urge to follow every stranger, to press their arms and gush:
** إﺣﻨﺎ أھﻞ! أﻧﺎ واﺣﺪ ﻣﻨﻜﻢ! ﺑﺎھﻠﻞ، ﺗﺄﺧﺬ ﺑﯿﺪي.
Their relatives greeted them with joyful shouts. Arms enwrapped their limbs and necks, kisses and duʾa like warm rain. Aunts clasped Ziyad’s face, exclaiming at his growth. Children clucked and spun. The travelers dropped suitcases swollen with gifts, sank onto seat cushions, aching after three days journeying by land. Circled by her kin, Horea surged with life. She answered their clamor with laughter and reassurances that the two had arrived unharmed.
Beside her, a dazed Ziyad returned the chain of salaams, overwhelmed by the sight of faces at once intimate and strange. Some were new to him, while others shimmered as half memories. But even the stranger’s faces held some contour he recognized. In the coming weeks he would struggle to keep track of the dozens who now claimed him by name. But for the rest of his life, Ziyad would be in love with homecomings and live in terror of goodbyes.
Night after night, over pots of endless sweetened shay, history swam into him. His mother and her relatives turned for hours to reminiscing, trading long and layered tales of ʿIbdis, of a time before the wars. Sometimes, she startled Ziyad, flashing the smile of another age. Word by word, they raised a world inside him. There, new hunger grew.
The occupation had changed Gaza. Everywhere, the work of theft was plain. Illegal Jewish settlements appeared in both Gaza and the West Bank, bringing thousands of Zionists into their midst. But one strange blessing arrived with the occupation: because the Israelis declared all the land for themselves, Gaza became, briefly, relatively, porous. For a time, it became possible to travel from the Strip to the West Bank and even the territories lost in the Nakba—the territory called Israel by many, but which Palestinians referred to as The Inside or 1948. A refusal: the Zionist entity was an actor, an idea—but the land still knew its name.
And so Ziyad found himself swept by relatives beyond the borders of his memory. Through their day trips outside the Strip, Palestine began to sprawl. In mere hours, he might find himself playing soccer in Hebron or swimming in Tel Aviv. Another strange intimacy: Palestine was far vaster than he’d ever seen, and yet all of it was so close. The long Occupation has succeeded in changing us from children of Palestine to children of the idea of Palestine, wrote Mourid Barghouti. I have always believed that it is in the interests of an occupation, any occupation, that the homeland should be transformed in the memory of its people into a bouquet of “symbols.” That summer, Ziyad’s homeland gathered, widened. It built itself in the sand behind his ears, the fried fish in his throat. The child of Gaza was growing, a son of Palestine.
————
* “Is there a Palestinian history or culture? There is none . . . There is no such thing as a Palestinian people.” —Israeli finance minister Bezalel Smotrich
** We’re family! I’m one of you! Please, take my hand.
Excerpted from The Hollow Half by Sarah Aziza. Reprinted with permission of the publisher, Catapult. Copyright © 2025 by Sarah Aziza.
