Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A deeply moving memoir of illness and recovery that traces one young woman’s journey from diagnosis to remission to re-entry into “normal” life—from the founder of The Isolation Journals and a subject of the Netflix documentary American Symphony
ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, Bloomberg, The Rumpus, She Reads, Library Journal, Booklist
“I was immersed for the whole ride and would follow Jaouad anywhere. . . . Her writing restores the moon, lights the way as we learn to endure the unknown.”—Chanel Miller, The New York Times Book Review
“Beautifully crafted . . . affecting . . . a transformative read . . . Jaouad’s insights about the self, connectedness, uncertainty and time speak to all of us.”—The Washington Post
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. Between Two Kingdoms is a profound chronicle of survivorship and a fierce, tender, and inspiring exploration of what it means to begin again.
ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, Bloomberg, The Rumpus, She Reads, Library Journal, Booklist
“I was immersed for the whole ride and would follow Jaouad anywhere. . . . Her writing restores the moon, lights the way as we learn to endure the unknown.”—Chanel Miller, The New York Times Book Review
“Beautifully crafted . . . affecting . . . a transformative read . . . Jaouad’s insights about the self, connectedness, uncertainty and time speak to all of us.”—The Washington Post
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. Between Two Kingdoms is a profound chronicle of survivorship and a fierce, tender, and inspiring exploration of what it means to begin again.
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Readers say *Between Two Kingdoms* is a beautifully written, raw, and intimate memoir that offers deep insight into living with and beyond cancer. Rev...
Great book with raw opening to her view of life through such a hard time. I loved her writing and would recommend!
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What’s it about?
Suleika Jaouad is the author of the New York Times column- “Life, Interrupted”. When Suleika is a senior at Princeton an itch begins on her leg and does not stop. Exhaustion soon follows. She is eventually diagnosed with Leukemia. This book chronicles her battle with cancer, the toll it took on her relationships, and and then her transition back to “normal” life.
What did it make me think about?
How good writing can really make you feel the experiences of others.
Should I read it?
This book really touched my heart. The cancer journey was illuminating, but her journey of self-discovery is what made it special for me. I would highly recommend this memoir. It is really a book about dealing with loss- and who can’t learn from that?
Quote-
“That night, I began to think about how porous the border is between the sick and the well. It’s not just people like Bret and me who exist in the wilderness of survivorship. As we live longer and longer, the vast majority of us will travel back and forth across these realms, spending much of our lives somewhere in between. These are the terms of our existence. The idea of striving for some beautiful, perfect state of wellness? It mires us in eternal dissatisfaction, a goal forever out of reach.
“To be well now is to learn to accept whatever body and mind I currently have.”
What’s it about?
Suleika Jaouad is the author of the New York Times column- “Life, Interrupted”. When Suleika is a senior at Princeton an itch begins on her leg and does not stop. Exhaustion soon follows. She is eventually diagnosed with Leukemia. This book chronicles her battle with cancer, the toll it took on her relationships, and and then her transition back to “normal” life.
What did it make me think about?
How good writing can really make you feel the experiences of others.
Should I read it?
This book really touched my heart. The cancer journey was illuminating, but her journey of self-discovery is what made it special for me. I would highly recommend this memoir. It is really a book about dealing with loss- and who can’t learn from that?
Quote-
“That night, I began to think about how porous the border is between the sick and the well. It’s not just people like Bret and me who exist in the wilderness of survivorship. As we live longer and longer, the vast majority of us will travel back and forth across these realms, spending much of our lives somewhere in between. These are the terms of our existence. The idea of striving for some beautiful, perfect state of wellness? It mires us in eternal dissatisfaction, a goal forever out of reach.
“To be well now is to learn to accept whatever body and mind I currently have.”
Between Two Kingdoms focuses largely on Suleika Jaouad’s cancer diagnosis and the years she spent navigating illness, relationships, and the profound changes to her life over a five-year period. I found this portion of the book compelling and deeply personal. I had hoped for more exploration of the people she met later in her journey—the ones who reached out to her and whom she visited—but that section was briefer and saved for the end. Still, the book was engaging and emotionally resonant. As a survivor of domestic violence, I couldn’t directly relate to the experience of cancer, but I deeply connected to the trauma of rebuilding one’s identity after enduring something life-altering.
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