Between Two Kingdoms is a profound chronicle of survivorship and a fierce, tender, and inspiring exploration of what it means to begin again.Suleika Jaouad's 2021 memoir Between Two Kingdoms is the kind of book that moved me on a cellular level-the kind I stayed up too late listening to, compulsively texted my friends about and mourned when it was over.
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. 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. 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. And now that she’d done so, she realized that she had no idea how to live. She had spent the past 1,500 days in desperate pursuit of one goal-to survive. But as she would soon learn, a cure is not where the work of healing ends it’s where it begins. 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.
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. By the time Jaouad flew home to New York, she had lost her job, her apartment, and her independence. Just like that, the life she had imagined for herself had gone up in flames. 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. Next came the exhaustion, and the six-hour naps that only deepened her fatigue. It started with an itch-first on her feet, then up her legs, like a thousand invisible mosquito bites.
The real world she found, however, would take her into a very different kind of conflict zone. She had fallen in love and moved to Paris to pursue her dream of becoming a war correspondent. In the summer after graduating from college, Suleika Jaouad was preparing, as they say in commencement speeches, to enter “the real world”. "How do you react to a cancer diagnosis at age twenty-two? Do you break down in sobs? Do you faint, or scream? In that moment, a feeling flooded through my body, unexpected and perverse: relief." BETWEEN TWO KINGDOMS
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