I marveled at how each chapter worked as a complete story, though the aggregate is even more powerful. The conversational style is straightforward and direct, intimate. ” She is resilient and inspirational even as she is flawed and human. As long as I was stuck in bed, my imagination would become the vessel that allowed me to travel beyond the confines of my room. If the chemo sores in my mouth made it too painful to talk, I would find new ways to communicate. Unwilling to be passive or to consider herself a victim, Suleika claims her voice, explaining: “I decided to imagine my survival as a creative act. We mourn the deaths of friends she makes during her long hospital stays, ache for her and her parents and lover as they hope for good outcomes in the face of excruciating treatments. We celebrate her romantic relationship, her move to Paris, her quest for a great job. Her story incorporates elements of mystery, romance, identity, and coming of age in a narrative of what it is like to experience and chronicle a life-threatening disease. Suleika’s memoir of illness starts with an unexplained itch: as a college student, she struggles to discover an explanation for her persistent fatigue and the uncontrollable need to scratch her legs. Suleika references Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor in choosing her title: “Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick.” In her expert hands, we realize how permeable the boundary is between the two states of being. In those early days of leading a school during Covid, I noted the website and joined Suleika’s mailing list but did not connect the dots that she was the creative force behind the Isolation Journals and the 100 Day Project and the author of this memoir until I listened to Between Two Kingdoms this spring. A friend of mine, in the early weeks of the pandemic, had shared with me Suleika’s website, The Isolation Journals and her 100 Day Project in which participants commit to creating one beautiful thing each day.
Sadly, her blood cancer, in remission by the end of Between Two Kingdoms, is back. Last spring, she married musician Jon Batiste. As a young woman battling blood cancer, she launched a column in the New York Times called “Life, Interrupted.” She published her memoir, Between Two Kingdoms, a record of her illness and an amazing cross-country road trip that followed, that is accessible, intimate, and riveting. By now, Suleika Jaoud’s story is quite well known.
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