They Told Me Back Home Would Be Beautiful (Memoir) set for publication on October 27, 2026 by One Signal / Simon & Schuster
“A deeply felt memoir of race and history that defies social erasures of the diasporic Palestinian experience, They Told Me Back Home Would Be Beautiful boldly explores how politicized identities, especially within the US, are shaped and manipulated by broader agendas.” —The Whiting Award Judges Citation
My father scours the web for century-old magazines about Palestine. For years, he would talk about these mysterious documents but rarely show them to anyone. “I have proof,” he would say to whoever would listen, “that Palestine exists.” —from the Prologue
In her Palestinian Christian home in San Francisco, Elena Dudum was raised in a household ruled by her father’s lectures. He taught her everything: the story of her grandparents’ flight from their homeland, the history of her family’s orange groves, and the ongoing occupation of Palestine. Above all, he taught her not to forget. Soon his lessons consumed her childhood, and Elena found herself shrinking from an inheritance that felt both sacred and suffocating.
For years, she resisted it all until a family trip to Palestine shattered the abstraction of her homeland. Checkpoints, razed olive groves, soldiers—it was all plainly in front of her, as were the ghosts of her family’s past. What was once always just out of reach, now pressed against her body. Back in the United States, something in her quietly unraveled. She tried to outrun what she now knew by burying herself in elite institutions and the rising world of tech, where ambition was rewarded and history was inconvenient.
Eventually, the inheritance she thought she could escape demanded reckoning.
Braiding rich personal narrative with archival fragments and cultural critique, They Told Me Back Home Would Be Beautiful traces one woman’s journey as she returns—slowly, deliberately—to her father’s lessons, determined to claim them on her own terms.
“Edward Said said that Palestinians have been denied “permission to narrate.” This remains true. As a Palestinian-American with refugee grandparents who fled Palestine in 1948, I’d like to change this.”
Elena Dudum is a Palestinian-Syrian writer and educator based in London. Her essays and cultural criticism—covering topics from Palestine to food, music, and diaspora—have appeared in The Atlantic, TIME Magazine, Bon Appétit, Food & Wine, Cosmopolitan, Autostraddle, and more. In 2025, she was awarded the Whiting Nonfiction Grant for Works-in-Progress to support the completion of her memoir, They Told Me Back Home Would Be Beautiful, which is forthcoming from One Signal in the fall of 2026. Dudum has also received support from Hedgebrook, Tin House, Sewanee, and The de Groot Foundation, where she was awarded the 2024 LANDO Grant. Dudum earned her MFA in Nonfiction from Columbia University, where she taught undergraduate writing and received the University Writing Fellowship. Before writing full-time, she worked in sales at LinkedIn, and later led brand strategy at Hims & Hers.
Visit Elena’s website: elenadudum.com
Find Elena on Instagram: @elena_dudum