It has left me with an awareness that haunts the edges of my vision-it can all be lost in a moment-but it’s also given me a jeweler’s eye,” Jaouad writes.
“The tangling of so much cruelty and beauty has made of my life a strange, discordant landscape. There is Lil’GQ, a convicted murderer who wrote to her about the brutality of isolation, and there is also Bret, a man whom she met in a hospital waiting room and with whom she formed a lasting bond. She decided to hop into an aging, bright yellow van and travel across the United States, in search of herself while making pitstops to visit a myriad of people she came to know while fighting for her life. Once treatment ended, Jaouad found herself depleted of energy as well as of a sense of self. All the while, the author longs for purpose amidst hospital monitors and normalcy whilst staring mortality in the eyes. Meanwhile, she stumbles upon a group of kindred spirits while in the hospital, some of whom do not survive their illnesses. Jaouad falls in love a few months before receiving a life-altering diagnosis and candidly details the effects that cancer has on a relationship. She walks her audience through love, loss, and longing through this lens. “To learn to swim in the ocean of not-knowing-this is my constant work,” Jaouad writes.
What results is an emotional tale of triumph over years of “incanceration” and a life reimagined while picking up the pieces that illness left scattered. In Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted, Jaouad takes the reader through a rare leukemia diagnosis and the subsequent years of survival that followed.
As a recent graduate of Princeton, she set her sights on a career as a war correspondent when, suddenly, she faced a personal war of an entirely different nature. Suleika Jaouad’s life was just beginning in 2010. Special to the Mississippi Clarion-Ledger Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life InterruptedĬancer survivor pens inspirational, forthright memoir
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