Reading: Between Two Kingdoms by Suleika Jaouad
"...the vast majority of us will travel back and forth across these realms, spending much of our lives somewhere in between."
By most accounts, Suleika Jaouad was living a young person’s dream shortly after graduating with the highest honors from Princeton with a major in Near Eastern studies and double minors in French and gender studies.
In addition to being fluent in French (Suleika’s first language), she also speaks English (obviously), Arabic, Spanish, and Farsi. So it will come as no surprise when she used this talent for languages to secure her first job… in Paris!
Not long after, Suleika’s boyfriend joined her there. A new relationship, but by all accounts, Suleika and her boyfriend were exploring love and life in a magnificent city.
But that’s not where Suleika starts her story in Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted. She starts her story describing an itch. Not an itch to travel and see the world, or an itch to live and work in Paris, but a literal itch on her skin. This itch developed while she was in college, and after being brushed off by doctors, this itch went misdiagnosed and barely treated. Basically it was ignored and treated as a minor skin irritation.
Then came the exhaustion and eventually, the fevers. Until one day, Suleika collapsed on a sidewalk in Paris.
With terrible numbers from blood tests and weak from illness, she was advised to return to New York immediately. And that was where Suleika was diagnosed with a rare form of acute myeloid leukemia and given a 35% chance of survival.
But that’s just the beginning. Suleika is an incredible storyteller, and in Between Two Kingdoms, she takes us on a journey of survival. In fact, she claims that “the hardest part of my cancer experience began once the cancer was gone.”
So while her story is about surviving cancer, it’s also about living once the cancer left her body. In the book, she takes readers on a road trip (literally), along with her adopted terrier, Oscar, to meet people who wrote to her while she was undergoing chemotherapy, clinical trials, and a bone marrow transplant. These meetings included a convicted murderer on death row in Texas who had compared his own isolation, small cell, and impending death to the sterile white-walled room she lived in and her own mortality.
The readers also meet a high school teacher in California who lost her bipolar son to suicide. And we got to experience the friendships Suleika formed with other cancer patients, as well as the heartbreak when a couple of those friends succumbed to their illnesses.
By meeting these people, I, as the reader, got to witness various forms of survival and bravery right along with Suleika.
I am not going to lie to you. At times, hearing Suleika’s story, as well as hearing the stories of other survivors of extremely difficult circumstances, was difficult. I am the mother of two children, one of which is Suleika’s age at the time she received her cancer diagnosis, and another who recently received his own challenging medical diagnosis.
Suleika’s writing was beautiful and warm, and her storytelling was smart, well-researched, and at times, brutally honest. I listened to the book on audio in Suleika’s own voice on a recent road trip to Atlanta to celebrate the life of a friend I lost earlier this year. While I’m not sure if this changed my experience, hearing Suleika tell her story in her own voice left me in tears often, and I couldn’t listen to it in one sitting. At the same time, I couldn’t not finish it. In addition to being a story of survival, it’s a story of living and loving your way through life. It’s a coming of age story. It’s a story of exploration.
Between Two Kingdoms left me meditating on the idea where Suleika got the title for her memoir. She took it from Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor, a 1978 work of critical theory in which the author says: "Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick." When we face illness, we realize that the foundations of these two kingdoms and everything in between is probably more unstable than most of us believe.
“As we live longer and longer, the vast majority of us will travel back and forth across these realms, spending much of our lives somewhere in between. These are the terms of our existence. The idea of striving for some beautiful, perfect state of wellness? It mires us in eternal dissatisfaction, a goal forever out of reach. To be well now is to learn to accept whatever body and mind I currently have.” - Suleika Jaouad
After reading Between Two Kingdoms, I was thrilled to discover Suleika Jaouad’s The Isolation Journals on Substack. She is a gifted and inspirational writer and creative. I’m excited to see what she creates next. You can subscribe to her Substack, purchase her book, and follow her on Instagram, where she is active.
I hope you’ll read Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted. If you do, please come back and let me know what you thought in the comments or drop me an email.