THE SUNDAY REVIEW | BETWEEN TWO KINGDOMS – SULEIKA JAOUAD

So I’ve had my yearly hibernation period and didn’t finish a book for nearly three months. I normally resurface a bit sooner, but, you know, Omicron. I unexpectedly am now homeschooling… again. I love it, but it’s all-consuming! I have picked at a few books – Under the Whispering Door, made quite good headway with The 1619 Project, which I will be circling back to finish soon – but didn’t quite stick with any of them long enough to finish. Until my hold on the audiobook of this one came in at the library, and I decided to give it a try.

This is the memoir of a young woman, Suleika, who falls mysteriously ill while in Paris working on her dream of becoming a journalist. After months of odd and seemingly minor symptoms, and a vague feeling that everything that’s wrong with her is really that she’s just not suited to the “real world.” Until the situation suddenly worsens, and next thing she knows, she’s back on a plane headed back to her parents and her childhood home so that she can undergo more tests and finally figure out what’s wrong with her.

Which she does, but it’s not good news. It turns out that this is the beginning of what would become very long, very difficult (and still ongoing) treatment. Her life suddenly freezes, and everything that she was and worked for suddenly no longer applies. Her boyfriend (of only a few months) drops his life, moves into her parents’ house with her, and together with her family, they begin an arduous journey.

The first half of this book is consumed by this journey. There are bright points – she meets some wonderful friends and gets a job working for The New York Times, chronicling her journey as a young, sick person. But mostly it’s a time full of limits, illness, weakness and loss of independence. She has support, but her inability to do anything, even the basics of caring for herself, takes a toll on everyone around her. I won’t say exactly what this means for her, because spoilers, but suffice it to say that her illness took more from her than she ever could have imagined losing.

— This part might be considered spoilers, so if you don’t want to know how her treatment goes, skip the paragraphs between the red bits —

But she makes it through, and the second half of the book is about her – equally hard – re-entry into the world outside the hospital. While she was locked into the fight, her world shrank to only that. There was nothing beyond it, and all her former dreams and plans dissolved in the face of it. When she suddenly regained her life, she discovered that not only had the world moved on without her, but she had changed irrevocably. She struggles to find a way to fit her new self into this larger world, and it just doesn’t work.

So she decides to take a literal journey. She gets her driver’s license, borrows a car, and embarks on a roadtrip to visit (and meet) all the people she connected with via her column. She meets other survivors, others who are still struggling. Through these meetings, she is able to practice inhabiting the world again, and learn where her new limits are and where her comfort zone ends. She’s also able to connect in person with people who helped her during her treatment and whose stories have, in one way or another, overlaps with her own struggles.

— End of spoilers —

I was surprised by how much of this book felt familiar to me. I’ve never had this type of illness. And the author is at a very different point in her life to where I’m at (sometimes it was hard to read her struggles with her boyfriend or see how long it took her to figure things out, because I’ve been around a while and it’s not new to me). But some of the emotions and frustrations she shared, some of her reactions to her circumstances, felt deeply familiar to me. I know the feeling of your life narrowing and narrowing until all that is left is taking your next breath, and not knowing if you’re even going to be able to do that. I know how it feels to not be able to talk to people anymore because it feels like you can’t even understand what they’re saying when they’re talking about “normal” things. I know the feeling post-illness (or with ongoing illness) that you’re just not safe anymore. No matter what you do, you’re always just waiting for something in your body to go wrong again, and that fear is paralyzing.

I don’t find every part of this book to be enlightening. Maybe if I were still in my early- to mid-twenties and learning the lessons that come with early adulthood I would, but I’ve already moved past that. So the book loses a star for me there because it fell a bit flat in parts. But there are other bits of it that put words to my experiences in a way I rarely read or hear. Being ill – whether chronically or seriously for a period of time – changes a person. In ways no one outside of that club of misfits can ever really understand. But I do think that books like this, if read by people who are trying to support and relate to someone in that situation, can really help provide some insight as to what’s going on. So for that, I am grateful this book exists and seems to have been quite widely popular. I’d highly recommend it to anyone who had either been through a similar experience, or who knows and cares about someone who’s there. If you have any measure of empathy, it will help you step into those shoes a little bit.

A searing, deeply moving memoir of illness and recovery that traces one young woman’s journey from diagnosis to remission and, ultimately, a road trip of healing and self-discovery.

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. – Goodreads

Book Title: Between Two Kingdoms
Author: Suleika Jaouad
Series: No
Edition: Paperback/Audiobook
Published By: Random House
Released: February 9, 2021
Genre: Non-Fiction, Memoir, Illness, Self Discovery
Pages: 352
Date Read: February 9-10, 2022
Rating: 9/10
Average Goodreads Rating: 4.43/5 (32,996 ratings)