Every time I read a memoir, you are going to hear me say how inspiring it is. But it is true! I enjoy reading true-life stories about overcoming adversity. They restore what little faith I have in humanity, and they encourage me to live my own best life. I cannot say that I heard of Suleika Jaouad before reading Between Two Kingdoms. She wrote a column for the New York Times called “Life, Interrupted” and is a motivational speaker. I decided to read her memoir because it is currently number one on Indigo’s Best Books of 2021 list. It is an engrossing read that I absolutely recommend.

Suleika Jaouad was just twenty-two years old and fresh out of college when she got a diagnosis that would change the entire trajectory of her life. For months before the diagnosis, she was living with an itch that would not stop; she would scratch her legs so much that they would be covered in blood. She was also constantly exhausted, and no amount of napping would give her the energy she needed to even just walk up a flight of stairs. She then began to develop sores in her mouth. She was living in Paris and about to make a move into journalism, and had just fallen in love, when it was recommended that she return home to the US as her health was getting worse. Once back in the US, further testing revealed she had acute myeloid leukemia, an aggressive form of cancer with a 35% chance of survival.

Suleika spent the next three to four years of her life in and out of hospitals, enduring round after round of chemo, and had a life-saving bone marrow transplant. In Between Two Kingdoms she is unflinchingly honest about her experience as a cancer patient and describes in detail the treatments she went through and their effect on her body (I’m not going to lie, I found myself squirming a lot while reading the first half of the book). She started writing her column for the New York Times not only because she needed a purpose, but so she could advocate for other cancer patients. As a young cancer patient, her doctors did not tell her about one of the side effects of her treatment, which is infertility. Her doctors were used to dealing with older cancer patients, so it did not occur to them to tell her. She had to find out about this side effect through online research. It forced her to examine whether she wanted children, something that she did not think she would have to consider until she was older and more settled in life.

Suleika is also unflinchingly honest about the emotional affect of having cancer, especially on her relationship with her boyfriend, who was her primary caregiver during most of her treatment. She details the fights they would have and the anger she felt towards him every time he said he needed a break and would take off on a trip without her.  She also writes about the friendships she had with other cancer patients, and the heartbreak she lives with after each one of them dies.

At twenty-six, Suleika finished her last chemo treatment and was finally considered cancer free, but she was not completely out of the woods. She finds herself now navigating between the “kingdom of the well” and the “kingdom of the sick”. She is more susceptible to illness and her cancer could possibly come back one day. After her last chemo treatment, she realized she did not know what to do with her life. Up until that point, her life was so structured around treatments and hospital visits, and she admits that she missed being sick as it was the one constant in her life.

The second half of Between Two Kingdoms focuses on Suleika’s road trip around the US with her dog to meet the people that wrote to her while she was writing her “Life, Interrupted” column. It is somewhat concerning that after surviving cancer, she decides to travel around the country by herself when she can barely drive in order to meet strangers. Her doctors give her the okay to travel for 100 days, but she almost immediately gets sick with a cold. Not to mention, she is a woman travelling alone; she mentions a couple of sketchy situations that had my heart pounding. But if Suleika can survive an aggressive form of cancer, she can survive a road trip. In the end, it was what she needed to reflect on the journey cancer has taken her through so far, and it gave her the impetus she needed to start her life again.