And now that she’d done so, she realized that she had no idea how to live. She had spent the past 1,500 days in desperate pursuit of one goal-to survive. But as she would soon learn, a cure is not where the work of healing ends it’s where it begins. When Jaouad finally walked out of the cancer ward-after three and a half years of chemo, a clinical trial, and a bone marrow transplant-she was, according to the doctors, cured. She would spend much of the next four years in a hospital bed, fighting for her life and chronicling the saga in a column for The New York Times. By the time Jaouad flew home to New York, she had lost her job, her apartment, and her independence.

Just like that, the life she had imagined for herself had gone up in flames. Then 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. Next came the exhaustion, and the six-hour naps that only deepened her fatigue. It started with an itch-first on her feet, then up her legs, like a thousand invisible mosquito bites. The real world she found, however, would take her into a very different kind of conflict zone. She had fallen in love and moved to Paris to pursue her dream of becoming a war correspondent. In the summer after graduating from college, Suleika Jaouad was preparing, as they say in commencement speeches, to enter “the real world”. A searing, deeply moving memoir of illness and recovery that traces one young woman’s journey from diagnosis to remission and, ultimately, a road trip of healing and self-discovery.

Between two kingdoms suleika jaouad