We get only Jaouad’s telling, of course, but she does not go easy on herself, describing her anger when he doesn’t give as much support as she wants, even as she shows us he was breaking with the effort to give what he did – especially considering he had never made any vows about sticking around “in sickness and in health.” She was living with Will, whom she had met in New York just a few months earlier, and their relationship forms the through line for the book as cancer shoves them past their meet-cute beginnings and moves them into the emotional turmoil of what ends up being years of treatment. Jaouad was 22 and working a paralegal gig in Paris when she learned she had acute myeloid leukemia, a disease usually found in people three times her age. I grow pickier each year, but I’m happy to report that Suleika Jaouad finds fresh territory to explore with her well-crafted book Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of Life Interrupted. Twenty years later, I’m studying end-of-life narratives for my doctoral dissertation, and I’m still reading a lot of cancer memoirs. A lot of doctors fumble diagnoses, a lot of hair falls out. After a while, though, the stories I read started to have a sameness about them. A lot of them.Īt first, I appreciated seeing my own experiences echoed on the pages – the time when the doctor fumbled the diagnosis, the time when locks of hair fell out, the time when a friend couldn’t cope so she disappeared. None of my peers had gone through that experience, and this was back in the early aughts, a few years before the birth of the social media industrial complex, so as I navigated this new space, I read cancer memoirs.

Between two kingdoms book review