AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |
Back to Blog
![]() In the tension between health and sickness, past and present, a new balance must be forged. Jaouad is writing about a process, a back-and-forth. Yet this is also, I think, part of the point. It’s a bold move, this tonal shift, and at times it can be jarring. Jaouad makes that explicit by shifting to present tense in the second half of the book - the part about recovery - as she travels the United States, visiting the people, many of them readers of her blog, who offered her solace during the years she was sick. But Between Two Kingdoms is also about the struggle to remain a participant in one’s own life. To highlight this porousness, she reveals how cancer changed her family dynamics. Life and death, health and sickness … they overlap and blur together in the singular experience of the now. Jaouad’s point is that we never fully get better, just as we were never fully well in the first place. She survived the illness, but the story doesn. She won an Emmy award for her New York Times column, Life Interrupted, which she wrote during her four years fighting cancer. Suleika Jaouad is an author, journalist, and activist. What, though, does reconciliation really mean? How do we put a piece of our lives away?. an emmy award-winning writer and activist describes the harrowing years she spent in early adulthood fighting leukemia and how she learned to live again while forging connections with other. Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted. More significantly, however, the phrase implies that her illness was not part of her life. But how does this happen? And what does one do after it has? The key is not so much recollection but reconciliation, which is part of the intention of the memoir. The allusion to Girl, Interrupted, Susanna Kaysen’s 1993 memoir of mental illness is especially clumsy coupled with the reference to Susan Sontag in the main title if not as profound as Sontag, Jaouad’s writing certainly stands on its own. This question functions as lodestar, something of a guiding light. 'How do you react to a cancer diagnosis at age twenty-two?' she wonders. Rather, what we get is a young person wrestling with a situation she would have once considered unimaginable, until it became the substance of her life. At the behest of a therapist whom her parents insist she see due to understandable depression. Although Jaouad spends most of the book in the kingdom of the sick, this story is ultimately life affirming. There is no self-pity in this telling and few of the expected pieties. The two kingdoms referenced in the book’s title are the kingdom of the sick and the kingdom of the well. I wanted to build a bridge, both for myself and others, between the no longer and the not yet. In it, I wanted to shatter the false mythologies of recovery and the omerta of silence that enshrouds the realities of survivorship. Here is the key to Between Two Kingdoms - Jaouad’s disarming honesty. Between Two Kingdoms is the book I would have wanted to read when I was emerging from treatment.
0 Comments
Read More
Leave a Reply. |