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Top of the pile
91
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
94/100Critics
88/100Scholars
Author:
Suleika Jaouad
Publisher:
Random House
Date:
February 9, 2021
An Emmy Award-winning writer and activist describes the harrowing years she spent in early adulthood fighting leukemia and how she learned to live again while forging connections with other survivors of profound illness and suffering.
What The Reviewers Say
A leukemia diagnosis split Jaouad’s life into two distinct parts: before and after. 'Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted' is a beautifully crafted account of this split, this rupture — But what might be more harrowing, and ultimately more affecting, is the interiority of this book. Jaouad gives readers an intimate look not only into her experience but also into her thinking about the experience. Her insights about the self, connectedness, uncertainty and time speak to all of us, not only readers who’ve faced a life-changing — and potentially life-ending — diagnosis.
In the beginning, we treated the pandemic as a suspended time between two realities, hoping we could hold our breath and wait for things to resume. Between Two Kingdoms, by Suleika Jaouad, has arrived as a guide to another kind of in-between, with haunting similarities.
Here is the key to Between Two Kingdoms — Jaouad’s disarming honesty. There is no self-pity in this telling and few of the expected pieties. Rather, what we get is a young person wrestling with a situation she would have once considered unimaginable, until it became the substance of her life. 'How do you react to a cancer diagnosis at age twenty-two?' she wonders. This question functions as lodestar, something of a guiding light.
In her searing memoir, Emmy Award–winning speaker, writer, and activist Jaouad describes how, diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia at age 22, she found herself, as Susan Sontag described coping with cancer, as living in a world divided into two kingdoms: the healthy and the sick.
