Talk to Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted like its author wrote you back.
Get the ideas that fit your life — not generic summaries.
- Chat with the book
- Audiobook-style main ideas
- Adapts to your life and goals
- Helps you take action
What it argues
Suleika Jaouad was twenty-two and newly graduated, living in Paris with her first real job and a boyfriend, when she was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia. Between Two Kingdoms is the account of the four years that followed — years of chemotherapy, bone marrow transplants, isolation, and the strange suspended existence of serious illness — and of the years afterward, when she had to figure out who she was once survival was no longer the only task.
The title names a condition Jaouad returns to throughout: the space between being sick and being well, between the person she was before and whoever she might become. She writes about the seductiveness of the sick role, the difficulty of accepting care, and the way illness reorganizes every relationship. Her parents' marriage frays under the pressure of her treatment. Her boyfriend stays, then doesn't. She falls for a fellow patient who later dies. The hospital becomes, paradoxically, a kind of home — more familiar than the outside world that kept going without her.
What it gets right
- 1.
Survival is not the end of illness; it is a threshold into a different kind of uncertainty where identity, purpose, and belonging all have to be reconstructed.
- 2.
The space 'between two kingdoms' — not sick enough to be a patient, not well enough to be a civilian — is its own country, with its own rules and disorientation.
- 3.
Serious illness reorganizes relationships in ways that are often permanent. It reveals who shows up and what the presence of suffering actually costs people.
What it covers
Who wrote it
Suleika Jaouad is an American writer and activist. She wrote the "Life, Interrupted" column for the New York Times during her cancer treatment, which was later recognized with an Emmy Award when adapted for television. She is a co-founder of The Isolation Journals, a creative wellness community she launched during the COVID-19 pandemic. Between Two Kingdoms, published in 2021, was her debut book and became a New York Times bestseller. She lives in New York.
