“With my bald head, pallor, and port,” she admits, “illness became the first thing that people noticed about me. 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. There is no self-pity in this telling and few of the expected pieties. Here is the key to “Between Two Kingdoms” - Jaouad’s disarming honesty. She talks to a fellow griever about ‘Sanctuary,’ her follow-up memoir about rebuilding a life. My fatigue was not evidence of partying too hard or an inability to cut it in the real world, but something concrete, something utterable that I could wrap my tongue around.”īooks A grieving mother’s follow-up memoir asks: What now?Įmily Rapp Black lost her toddler to Tay-Sachs disease. I wasn’t a hypochondriac, after all, making up symptoms. “After the bewildering months of misdiagnosis,” she writes, “I finally had an explanation for my itch, for my mouth sores, for my unraveling. When Jaouad is diagnosed, her first response is relief. Even my lips looked drained of life force.” My eyelids were a robin’s egg blue, as if all of the veins had floated to the surface. I itched while I slept.” Accompanying the itch is an all-encompassing exhaustion, and skin “so pale it was nearly translucent. I itched while dancing with friends on the beer-soaked floors of basement taprooms. “I itched under the big wooden desk of my library carrel. “I itched during my part-time job at the campus film lab,” she tells us. The second is Susan Sontag, who in “ Illness as Metaphor” wrote, “Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick.” For Jaouad, this split asserts itself during her senior year at Princeton, when she begins to suffer from an unbearable itch. The first is “ Life, Interrupted,” the video and text blog Jaouad began to write for the New York Times in 2012, a year after her diagnosis. The book’s title has a pair of antecedents. Such a conundrum sits at the center of “ Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted,” Jaouad’s account of her sickness and recovery. “he mystery is not ‘if’ but ‘when’ death appears in the plotline.” But is there really a divide between health and illness? “We are all terminal patients on this earth,” Jaouad reminds us. Diagnosed at 22 with myeloid leukemia, she spent four years in the country of the sick and dying before returning to the landscape of the well. “Write as if you were dying,” Annie Dillard advised in her 1989 book “ The Writing Life.” It’s a piece of wisdom Suleika Jaouad has taken to heart. If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from, whose fees support independent bookstores. Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted"
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |