In the summer after graduating from college, Suleika Jaouad was preparing, as they say in commencement speeches, to enter “the real world”. She had fallen in love and moved to Paris to pursue her dream of becoming a war correspondent. The real world she found, however, would take her into a very different kind of conflict zone.
It started with an itch—first on her feet, then up her legs, like a thousand invisible mosquito bites. Next came the exhaustion, and the six-hour naps that only deepened her fatigue. 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. Just like that, the life she had imagined for herself had gone up in flames. By the time Jaouad flew home to New York, she had lost her job, her apartment, and her independence. 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.
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. But as she would soon learn, a cure is not where the work of healing ends; it’s where it begins. She had spent the past 1,500 days in desperate pursuit of one goal—to survive. And now that she’d done so, she realized that she had no idea how to live.
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. 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. 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. Between Two Kingdoms is a profound chronicle of survivorship and a fierce, tender, and inspiring exploration of what it means to begin again.
I knew this was going to be a tough read for me, which is why I’ve continuously put it off for quite some time. I was fine until the moment that her parents and partner went to leave her for her first night in the hospital when she begins her treatment.
It instantly took me back to the many moments when my family would leave me at the hospital, me urging them to go and get some rest while secretly wishing someone could stay. Then hearing the click as the door shut, the whispered goodbyes fading away, the silence overwhelming me, my only companions for the night are the humming machines and whatever mindless show I had on the TV at the time. It is incredible how reading those few sentences took me back to those moments so vividly, the feelings still so powerful that I to put the book down and wait for my eyes to clear as tears threatened to flow, silently telling myself that this was just the beginning of her journey. If she was brave enough to write about it then I would be brave enough to read it.
There are parts that were seeing my worst nightmares realized on the pages, and I felt my heart break for this young woman and this horrible ordeal that she had to endure. There are moments of adult themes and language, but it’s not overboard and stays true to life, never taking away from the main narrative.
This was a passion project at the deepest and most primal level that takes you through the authors cancer battle. It is raw, real, and given even more depth when you listen to the audiobook version. Though it was a tough read for me I have no regrets. I applaud the author for being so transparent and sharing her harrowing journey.
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