Between Two Kingdoms by Suleika Jaouad

A searing, deeply moving memoir of illness and recovery that traces one young woman’s journey from diagnosis to remission and, ultimately, a road trip of healing and self-discovery.

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 three and a half years 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.

"Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and the kingdom of the sick." -- Susan Sontag

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.

My Verdict: I knew this would be a challenging read for me personally. In 2011, I was diagnosed at age 46. While I was much older than Suleika was when she was diagnosed and my direct battle was only 1 year long, there was so much in this memoir that was not only relatable for me, but also triggering of some emotions that I have avoided for a long time.

That being said, I am glad I read the book. What makes this different for me than other "cancer memoirs" is that the author walks the reader through her illness, but she also shares her journey once she is no longer physically ill. There is no self-pity in her narrative. Rather, what we get is a young person wrestling with a situation she would have once considered unimaginable, until it became the substance of her life. “How do you react to a cancer diagnosis at age twenty-two?” she wonders. She is fighting to just leave the kingdom of the sick. But how does this happen? And what does one do after it has? She is not so much recalling the time she was sick, as she is trying to explain how she made peace with it so she could move forward.

Jaouad’s point is that we never fully get better, just as we were never fully well in the first place. Life and death, health and sickness … they overlap and blur together and all we ever really have is the "now".

Some of the most difficult and moving parts of the memoir for me are when she talks about her relationships with other young people with cancer and the subsequent loss of those friends. What Jaouad is addressing is guilt and desolation; it is the experience of being left behind.

“Grief is a ghost that visits without warning. It comes in the night and rips you from your sleep.”

But “Between Two Kingdoms” is also about the struggle to remain a participant in one’s own life. Jaouad shifts to present tense in the second half of the book — the part about recovery — as she travels the United States, visiting the people, many of them readers of her blog, who offered her solace during the years she was sick. This can be a jarring shift for the reader, but I think that's the point. She is writing about a process. It is not a straight path to healing emotionally or physically.

“There is no restitution for people like us, no return to days when our bodies were unscathed, our innocence intact. Recovery isn’t a gentle self-care spree that restores you to a pre-illness state. … It is an act of brute, terrifying discovery.”

I give Between Two Kingdoms 5 stars.