Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted

An very personal and poignant account of sickness and recuperation, it follows a young lady from diagnosis to remission and, in the end, a voyage of self-discovery and healing via a road trip.

As commencement speakers put it, Suleika Jaouad was getting ready to face "the real world" in the summer after her college graduation. She came to Paris to follow her goal of becoming a war journalist after falling in love. But the actual world she would enter would be a totally different type of war zone.

The itching began, on her feet and progressed up her legs, like a thousand imperceptible mosquito bites. Then came the tiredness, and the six-hour naps that made her tiredness much worse. After that, she went to the doctor and, just a few weeks before turning 23, was told she had leukaemia and had only a 35% chance of life. The world she had planned for herself had vanished out of thin air in an instant. When Jaouad took a plane back to New York, she had lost her freedom, her career, and her flat. She would struggle for her life in a hospital bed for the majority of the following four years, writing about the ordeal in a column for The New York Times.

The physicians declared Jaouad healed when she eventually left the cancer hospital, after three and a half years of chemotherapy, a bone marrow transplant, and a clinical study. However, as she would soon discover, the process of healing doesn't stop with a cure; rather, it only starts there. She had been chasing survival with all of her might for the last 1,500 days. After realising this, she came to the conclusion that she had no clue how to live.

How would she live anew and rejoin the world? How could she get back what was taken from her? Together with her unkempt terrier mix, Oscar, Jaouad set off on a road adventure spanning 100 days and 15,000 miles across the nation. 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. During her journey, she discovered that the line between the well-and-ill is not always clear, and most people will move between these categories at some point in their life. Between Two Kingdoms is a profound chronicle of survivorship and a fierce, tender, and inspiring exploration of what it means to begin again.