#127 Learning to Live After Cancer
A review of ‘Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted’ by Suleika Jaouad
Here is a short review that I contributed to The DO Book Club column for December. I went back and read this book again and then listened to Ms. Jaouad’s narration of her story in the audiobook format. How can doctors and nurses truly understand what our patients are going through? Rarely, a creative like Ms. Jaouad takes us with her on her harrowing journey. Either way one chooses to read or listen, her memoir is a place where true empathy can begin.
The Review
When young Suleika Jaouad contracted a rare and aggressive form of leukemia, she had barely gotten started on her post-college career, a move to Paris, and a romance with a cute new boyfriend. As she returned to her supportive New York family, she got set to take on a bear of a disease with an equally brutal course of treatment.
Jaouad chronicles her illness, treatment and unique journey of post-illness discovery in the beautifully written memoir “Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted.” As the work of a musician and an artistic soul, this memoir takes on more twists and turns than a cross-country road trip. Oh yes, this is exactly what the young lady (who could barely drive a car) sets out to do. To liven things up, she takes along her new best friend, a terrier mutt named Oscar.
With equal measures of strength and courage, Jaouad plans her stand against the disease.
“I decided to reimagine my survival as a creative act,” she writes. “If the chemo sores in my mouth made it too painful to talk, I would find new ways to communicate. As long as I was stuck in bed, my imagination would become the vessel that allowed me to travel beyond the confines of my room.” (p. 109)
Jaouad starts a blog that improbably gets picked up for publication by The New York Times, which also begins to publish videos she creates about her illness. She wanted to shed light on the challenges of facing cancer treatment as a young adult. Her columns and videos touched thousands of readers, and many folks reached out to her to share their own stories and relate to her experiences.
After finishing several brutal courses of chemotherapy and a bone-marrow transplant, Jaouad was declared cancer-free. With little driving experience, she embarked on a cross-country road trip in an old VW van. She connects with an odd cast of characters who become her pen pals. She learns a thing or two about how one might carry on and thrive with life after cancer.
In a most personal and terrifying way, the author brings readers right along for the soaring highs and crashing lows of her diagnosis and treatment journey. She allows readers into her darkest and lightest places with a relentless sense of purpose and optimism. We get to know and root for several of her pals from the New York oncology ward. Jaouad reconnects with an old friend, the award-winning musician Jon Batiste, who later becomes her devoted husband.
Patient memoirs enable the reader to have an illuminating and frightening glimpse into what it is like to have the illness and undergo the rigors of treatment. Some are so heartbreaking because we know in advance that the author did not survive. When the spouse must step in to write the final chapter or postscript, we know.
Suleika Jaouad wrote every word of this very enjoyable and emotional memoir. We cannot help but root for her every step of the way.