Books › Between Two Kingdoms
Between Two Kingdoms
368 pages
A raw, beautifully observed journey through the wilderness of illness and the equally daunting landscape of survival.
What it feels like
Reading this memoir feels like sitting with a deeply trusted friend who is telling you the most harrowing, beautiful story of their life. It moves at a steady, reflective pace, anchoring you in the claustrophobic, fluorescent-lit world of hospital rooms before breaking open into the expansive, sun-drenched freedom of a cross-country road trip. The prose is lyrical yet journalistic, never flinching from the ugly realities of bodily betrayal or the messy, nonlinear nature of grief. It is steeped in a mood that is at once melancholic and fiercely life-affirming. This is a book for anyone who has ever had their life derailed and wondered how to begin again, offering a profound meditation on what it actually means to heal.
- Mood
- intimate
- raw
- melancholic
- life-affirming
- Tone
- candid
- vulnerable
- reflective
- earnest
- resilient
- Pace
- steady
- Themes
- surviving vs. living · the isolation of illness · rebuilding identity · the aftermath of trauma · finding community
- The writing
- Lyrical, deeply observant, and unflinchingly honest, balancing poetic reflection with journalistic clarity.
- The arc
- Moves from the terrifying freefall of a sudden diagnosis through the grueling endurance of treatment, culminating in a tentative, expansive journey toward reclaiming life.
- Who it's for
- Readers who appreciate profound, beautifully written memoirs about navigating life's darkest interruptions and the complicated work of healing.
Content notes
- cancer and severe illness
- medical trauma
- grief and death of friends
- depression
About the book
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.
Description from Open Library.
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