Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted – Suleika Jaouad
We meet Suleika Jaouad in her final months at Princeton, brushing off relentless itching that turns into bloody scabs. Health care providers write her off with the usual young-woman diagnoses: allergies, stress, menstruation and/or fatigue.
Meanwhile she’s living the recklessness of early adulthood — drugs, alcohol and messy relationships — partly to mask how physically miserable she actually is. It’s a familiar kind of denial for many in their invincible 20s..
While her background is not going to mirror most readers — she’s the daughter of highly educated, bohemian parents; full scholarship; first job in Paris; speaks multiple languages — it’s a charmed trajectory right up until it isn’t.
A few weeks shy of her 23rd birthday, Jaouad is diagnosed with a form of leukemia with a 35% chance of survival. Suddenly the big life she’d imagined for herself evaporates. By the time she flies home, her parents barely recognize her.
The first half of this memoir is incredibly morose and triggering, especially for anyone who has watched someone go through cancer treatment. Jaouad doesn’t soften the blows as she captures the daily humiliations, the physical and emotional erosion and the surreal experience of watching peers move forward while she’s effectively frozen in place.
Her honesty about losing friends on the cancer ward one by one is almost unbearable. There’s this helpless resolve to her voice — a reminder that all our petty daily inconveniences aren’t actually inconveniences at all.
Her relationship with boyfriend Will is one of the most surprising parts of the memoir. Their ending still clearly stings, but she’s remarkably fair. There’s no villainizing or revisionist history. For someone in their early twenties, his level of commitment is something most people twice their age can’t match.
You understand why she loved him and why loving her through that would break almost anyone. The gut punch that they shouldn’t get married because it would kick her off her father’s insurance is one of those “only in America” tragedies that shouldn’t feel as inevitable as it does.
The “reentry” section in Part II is fascinating because it taps into something universal: how disorienting it is to return to a “normal” life after living inside a rigid routine. The parallel she draws to formerly incarcerated people is spot on — she suddenly has time, choice, options and none of them make sense. She’s technically cured, but she no longer knows how to function outside the structures that kept her alive.
What she circles around again and again — and what stuck with me — is the idea of living a liminal life. She moves between states the way most people move between errands: healthy/sick, Paris/New York, treatment/remission, before/after. She becomes this constant in-betweener, someone who has spent years learning to live inside transition and is unsure how to settle.
So, it’s not surprising when she sets out on a 100-day, 15,000-mile road trip to meet the strangers who wrote her letters during her treatment — a death-row inmate, doomsday preppers, academics and other young cancer survivors. In theory it’s a fascinating portrait of America, and parts of it are. But there’s a repetitiveness to these encounters, a kind of gentle naïveté that doesn’t quite match someone who’s been through as she has.
It’s still compelling, but the raw emotional intensity of the first half is hard to top, and the book loses some of that energy once she’s off the cancer ward. Still, I really loved this memoir, as much as you can love something this heavy.
While some of this was surely self-edited, it feels remarkably frank, and I appreciated that she didn’t ignore the toll on caregivers. You feel the strain on Will, her parents and her brother. The uncertainty, the vigilance and the heartbreak of watching someone you love unravel and regenerate over and over.
Her audiobook narration is strong, too. Hearing her voice crack when she speaks about the friends she lost adds a layer the printed page can’t fully replicate.
This is a hard book beautifully written, and one I’m glad I read. It reminds you that the line between health and sickness, between the life you planned and the one you get, is thinner than we like to believe.
Rating (story): 4.5/5 stars
Rating (narration): 4/5 stars
Format: Audiobook (library loan)
Dates read: November 15 – November 24, 2025
Multi-tasking: Good to go. For heavy subject matter, Jaouad makes a pleasant companion as you go about daily activities.
