Synopsis -
In the summer after graduating from college, Suleika Jaouad was preparing, as they say in commencement speeches, to enter “the real world.” She had fallen in love and moved to Paris to pursue her dream of becoming a war correspondent. The real world she found, however, would take her into a very different kind of conflict zone.
It started with an itch—first on her feet, then up her legs, like a thousand invisible mosquito bites. Next came the exhaustion, and the six-hour naps that only deepened her fatigue. Then a trip to the doctor and, a few weeks shy of her twenty-third birthday, a diagnosis: leukemia, with a 35 percent chance of survival. Just like that, the life she had imagined for herself had gone up in flames. By the time Jaouad flew home to New York, she had lost her job, her apartment, and her independence. She would spend much of the next four years in a hospital bed, fighting for her life and chronicling the saga in a column for The New York Times.
When Jaouad finally walked out of the cancer ward—after countless rounds of chemo, a clinical trial, and a bone marrow transplant—she was, according to the doctors, cured. But as she would soon learn, a cure is not where the work of healing ends; it’s where it begins. She had spent the past 1,500 days in desperate pursuit of one goal—to survive. And now that she’d done so, she realized that she had no idea how to live.
How would she reenter the world and live again? How could she reclaim what had been lost? Jaouad embarked—with her new best friend, Oscar, a scruffy terrier mutt—on a 100-day, 15,000-mile road trip across the country. She set out to meet some of the strangers who had written to her during her years in the hospital: a teenage girl in Florida also recovering from cancer; a teacher in California grieving the death of her son; a death-row inmate in Texas who’d spent his own years confined to a room. What she learned on this trip is that the divide between sick and well is porous, that the vast majority of us will travel back and forth between these realms throughout our lives.
Review -
I first heard of writer Suleika Jaouad on the Netflix special American Symphony. I love reading memoirs and decided to pick up a copy of her book Between Two Kingdoms. It follows her early journey from about a year or so before her cancer diagnosis at age 22, through her long fight to beat it, and along the 100 day road trip she took after to rediscover herself and heal emotionally.
Jaouad is a wonderfully talented story teller. Not all who write memoirs can do this. I consumed Between Two Kingdoms in 2 days despite a busy schedule. I just couldn't put it down. I will not lie, this is not a uplifting easy read. The author takes us deep into the experience of fighting cancer in a very real way. We walk alongside her as her health declines. We feel the impact the diagnosis inflicts on her family and her partner. We are given a window into what it is like to live in a hospital room in total isolation, not for a few days, but for months at a time. She allowed me to experience her battle in a profound and deeply personal way.
I loved that Jaouad didn't chose to end the book with her return to the outside world. She instead offered a look at the harsh aftermath she faced after her long battle to beat cancer. Caregiver burnout, a broken relationship, fear that the cancer would return, and the realization that she could never go back to who she was or the life she lived before. The experience had changed her forever. I was relieved when she ended her story with positive thoughts that arose as she drove the final few miles back to her home base in New York City.
A truly great read. Bravo.
Meet the Author -
Born in New York City to a Tunisian father and a Swiss mother, Suleika Jaouad's career aspirations as a foreign correspondent were cut short when, at age 22, she was diagnosed with leukemia. She began writing the acclaimed New York Times column and video series "Life, Interrupted” from the front lines of her hospital bed, and has since become a fierce advocate for those living with illness and chronic pain.
She served on Barack Obama’s Presidential Cancer Panel, and her advocacy work, reporting and speaking engagements have brought her everywhere from the main stage of TED, the United Nations and Capitol Hill to a maximum security prison and a two-room schoolhouse in rural Montana. When she’s not on the road with her 1972 Volkswagen camper van and rescue dog Oscar, she lives in Brooklyn.
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