Born in New York City to a Tunisian father and a Swiss mother, Jaouad was diagnosed with leukemia at age twenty-two and has since become an advocate for those living with illness and chronic pain. Suleika Jaouad is an Emmy Award-winning writer, speaker, cancer survivor, and activist. Publication History: Random House HC (2/21) About the Author It is porous, and the vast majority of us will travel between these realms throughout our lives.īetween Two Kingdoms is a profound chronicle of survivorship and a fierce, inspiring exploration of what it means to begin again. What she learned on this trip is that the divide between the sick and the well doesn’t really exist. 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 had also spent years confined in a room. Suleika embarked-with her new best friend, Oscar, a scruffy terrier mutt-on a 100-day, 15,000-mile road trip across the country. And now that she’d done so, she realized she had no idea how to live. She had spent the past 1,500 days in desperate pursuit of one goal-to survive. When Suleika finally walked out of the hospital-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 would spend much of the next four years confined to a hospital bed, fighting for her life. By time she boarded a plane home to New York, she had lost her job, her apartment, and her independence. Just like that, the life she had imagined for herself was engulfed in flames. Then came 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. Then came the exhaustion, and the six-hour naps that only seemed to deepen her fatigue.
It started with an itch-first on her feet, then migrating up her legs-like a thousand mosquito bites. The “real world” she found, however, would take her into a very different kind of conflict zone.
In the summer of 2010, Suleika Jaouad had just graduated from college, 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. NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER / A searing, deeply moving memoir of illness and recovery that traces one young woman’s journey from diagnosis to remission to re-entry into “normal” life-from the author of the Life, Interrupted column in The New York Times
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