6/21/2023 0 Comments Life between two kingdoms![]() ![]() She was living with Will, whom she had met in New York just a few months earlier, and their relationship forms the through line for the book as cancer shoves them past their meet-cute beginnings and moves them into the emotional turmoil of what ends up being years of treatment. Jaouad was 22 and working a paralegal gig in Paris when she learned she had acute myeloid leukemia, a disease usually found in people three times her age. I grow pickier each year, but I’m happy to report that Suleika Jaouad finds fresh territory to explore with her well-crafted book Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of Life Interrupted. Twenty years later, I’m studying end-of-life narratives for my doctoral dissertation, and I’m still reading a lot of cancer memoirs. A lot of doctors fumble diagnoses, a lot of hair falls out. After a while, though, the stories I read started to have a sameness about them. A lot of them.Īt first, I appreciated seeing my own experiences echoed on the pages – the time when the doctor fumbled the diagnosis, the time when locks of hair fell out, the time when a friend couldn’t cope so she disappeared. ![]() None of my peers had gone through that experience, and this was back in the early aughts, a few years before the birth of the social media industrial complex, so as I navigated this new space, I read cancer memoirs. ![]()
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