“It began with an itch. Not a metaphorical itch to travel the world or some quarter-life crisis. But a literal, physical itch. A maddening, claw-at-your-skin, keep-you-up-at-night itch that surfaced during my senior year of college, first on the tops of my feet and then moving up my calves and thighs.”
Those are the opening lines to Suleika Jaouad’s memoir Between Two Kingdoms. After graduation, she moved to Paris to pursue her dream of becoming a war correspondent, but by the time she was twenty-three, with a diagnosis of leukemia and a 35 percent chance of survival, she moved back to New York to fight for her life.
Over the next four years, her body is ravaged with clinical trial treatments, a bone marrow transplant and multiple hospital stays with life threatening infections. The first half of the book chronicles her journey through the illness and, miraculously, to the other side. The second half of the book is about her journey to discover how to reenter the world. How do you redefine yourself when you are no longer a young woman with cancer? How do you re-learn to be independent and your own caregiver?
She decides to take a one-hundred-day road trip around the United States to visit some of the people who, after reading her New York Times articles about her illness, wrote to her. The people she visits range from a teenage cancer survivor in Florida to a death-row inmate in Texas. As the book jacket says this book “is a profound chronicle of survivorship and a fierce, tender, and inspiring exploration of what it means to begin again.”
If you know a cancer survivor, or are one yourself, then you must read Between Two Kingdoms by Suleika Jaouad.
