Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted
(Random House, $28) Overcoming leukemia does not make everything else about life instantly easy, said Heller McAlpin in NPR.org. When Suleika Jaouad emerged, in her mid20s, from a nearly four-year battle against the disease, she was “newly single, frail, and lost.” She had already written about entering “the kingdom of the sick” in a blog that became a popular New York Times column, and she retraces that journey in her new memoir. The details are all here, beginning with the excruciating itching in her legs that she first experienced during her senior year at Princeton. But Between Two Kingdoms stands out even among other powerful recent cancer memoirs because Jaouad has survived, enabling her to devote half of her “sometimes painfully honest” book to what she has called the hardest part of her ordeal: figuring out how to live again.
“Jaouad’s self-awareness is part of what makes this book such a transformative read,” said Maggie Smith in The Washington Post. “She doesn’t hide the least flattering parts of herself in those years— her neediness, her selfishness, even the cruelty she inflicts on those closest to her.” Later, she helps us understand how strange it can be to return to normal life after years of being defined by an illness. “Everything smells the same, looks the same, feels the same, but you are different,” she writes.
Jaouad never depicts herself as alone on her journey, and “she writes most movingly about her fellow travelers,” said David Ulin in the Los Angeles Times. In the second half of the book, she describes a 100-day road trip in which she visited various strangers who had written to her when she was in treatment and producing her Times column. The change in tone “can be jarring,” yet it’s part of the point: “Jaouad is writing about a process,” a back-and-forth in which the period after illness can’t truly be a place wholly separate from the illness. “Jaouad’s point is that we never fully get better, just as we were never fully well in the first place. Life and death, health and sickness; they overlap and blur together.”