One of the most alienating experiences a young person can have is realizing that who they are—at least, as they’ve learned to understand it—diverges from how their identity is understood by the rest of the world. As Elena Dudum recalls in her debut memoir, They Told Me Back Home Would Be Beautiful, she had that experience early, raised in early aughts San Francisco by Palestinian-Syrian-American parents. Since then, she has endeavored to continue work started by her father to build an archive of Palestinian history, examining and ultimately uplifting her cultural heritage.
Vogue spoke to Dudum about drawing inspiration from writers including Sarah Aziza, Cathy Park Hong, and Tara Westover for her book and telling her very personal story at a fraught sociopolitical moment.
Vogue: What did the process of putting this book together look like for you?
Elena Dudum: There are words in the book that were written in 2019, but I would say the majority of the work of the book really happened between 2023 and now. In 2023, I had graduated from grad school, and I had 40,000 words of what would become my proposal. That process of [writing] the proposal took about a year, and then I moved to London in January of 2024. It’s very strange because I had actually completed the other 40,000 words of the book in London, and then I left London a week before the book came out. Being in London created all this distance for me; I was in a city where I didn’t know many people and wasn’t in the same old routine. But part of the process was writing a book that wasn’t going to be the book. I originally wrote a version of it that didn’t even include me or my father.
You write so intimately about your family. How did you approach talking about the book and preparing them to see themselves in print?
Well, I had seven years of allowing my family to kind of warm up to this idea that I was writing a book. When I started the book in 2019, my family was like, “Okay, what?” I think they were a little confused or curious, but, like, not curious enough. My parents in particular were kind of upset by the idea because they were worried I’d be airing our dirty laundry. What ended up happening is that I published a few sections of my my thesis, which were the bones of my book, and my parents were sort of able to come on board as the process evolved. I received a grant, and they were like, “Oh, it’s interesting that someone gave her money for this.” Then I received another grant and got offers from agents, and I think as accolades slowly began to trickle in, it helped my parents see this as a professional, serious thing and something they could get behind and be okay with.
