Between Two Kingdoms - Suleika Jaouad
This book surprised me in so many (good) ways! I love reading memoirs, so I wasn’t surprised that this one gripped me from the first pages, but as I read on it opened so many doors in my heart and my mind, and made me think so much about my own life, and choices, and events that I had no choice over.
Suleika Jaouad is only in her early 20’s when she is diagnosed with a very aggressive form of leukemia. She is lucky enough to have a family and boyfriend who are ready to drop everything to ensure that she gets the best care that she can, but still, once treatments are underway her life hangs in the balance, chemo giving way to a bone marrow transplant, to more chemo, with endless hospital stays due to life threatening infections and so on. Four years after her diagnosis she is considered in remission, well enough to venture out into the world alone, but how does one learn to live again, when a future had seemed so out of reach for so long?
Between Two Kingdoms is a story of before, during, and after illness, but that is really only a barebones description, as the author’s words take us deep inside her own mind, but also our own minds. I loved how candid she is, and how she never glosses anything over, even during the darkest times in her life. There are times during her illness where I wondered how she even made it out alive, and there are also other times that she doesn’t evoke, or passes over, and you can only imagine how awful they must have been.
While Suleika and I have not had even similar lives on the surface (or even deeper than the surface really), I related to so many of the areas she talks about in the book. That desire to travel, to become part of where we land, the desire to write, to journal, the desire to expand all these desires into a life journey… The inner discussions with herself on the road, where she allows herself to fully analyze her life, her future, and her grief for everything and everyone she has lost. I know a few people who would love this memoir as much as I did, how evocative and beautifully written it is, and how personal and thought-provoking. There is only one area that I wondered about that I would have liked to have seen more developed in the book, and that is Suleika’s relationship with her brother. Are they closer now, or did her illness and the transplant cause a distance?
Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for the advance copy in exchange for an honest review.