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.

Jaouad's book stands out not only because she has lived to parse the saga of her medical battle with the benefit of hindsight, but also because it encompasses the less familiar tale of what it's like to survive and have to figure out how to live again. It helps that she is a deft researcher, a smart, sometimes painfully honest writer, and an audacious reporter. Between Two Kingdoms is a spectacular debut which leaves us eager to see what this gifted young woman will do next..

Raised to roam the globe, Jaouad found that her world had suddenly shrunk to a hospital room at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, where she underwent a stem cell transplant and other grueling treatments, which she began chronicling in a New York Times column called 'Life Interrupted.' Her engrossing memoir, Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of Life Interrupted, paints a more complete portrait of her experiences during and after treatment.

Every chapter ends with a cliffhanger, adding a surprising level of suspense to a work where the broader outcome isn’t in question. This is a stunning memoir, well-crafted and hard to put down..

A thoughtful memoir of dealing with cancer and feeling 'at sea, close to sinking, grasping at anything that might buoy me.'.