Jon's here, and because I had my bone marrow transplant at the height of Omicron-not ideal timing-we had to really form our own little pod, and it's such a privilege to be surrounded by so much love and care. My brother, who's a fourth grade teacher in New York City, is here. My parents moved back from Tunisia to help take care of me.

but once the shock wore off and I found myself back in treatment, it's also been a strangely beautiful time. It was overwhelming and it was terrifying. We had a weekend to pack up all of our things, to find temporary homes for our dogs, to find a borrowed apartment in New York City and for me to begin chemo. Not just my world, but my partner's world and my family's world completely imploded. When my oncologist called me, she was in tears. It's so incredibly rare, I think less than 1% of patients, according to my doctor, relapse 10 years after a bone marrow transplant. I mean, my whole world has been turned upside down since I learned in November that my illness was back. I believe I'm on day plus-32 post transplant and I've been out of the hospital for almost exactly a week.

It's the hardest question, I think, for any of us to answer honestly. to be well now is to learn to accept whatever body and mind I currently have.' 'The idea of striving for some beautiful, perfect state of wellness? It mires us in eternal dissatisfaction.

'As we live longer and longer, the vast majority of us will travel back and forth between these realms,' she writes.

Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.' Jaouad continually explores what it means to live in the middle, including on a post-treatment road trip to meet readers who connected with her as a New York Times columnist. That precious hold over the reader is a function of Jaouad's unsparingly intimate account of her leukemia diagnosis in 2010 at age 22, just as she'd fallen in love with a new boyfriend and moved to Paris the disruption of her young life in what we are told is our prime, including a bone marrow transplant and four brutal years of treatment the band of friends she made, and lost, in the cancer ward and what would be the most challenging phase of cancer: learning how to live again after surviving it.īetween Two Kingdoms is derived from a piece of Susan Sontag's 1978 critical theory, Illness as Metaphor: 'Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Suleika Jaouad's 2021 memoir Between Two Kingdoms is the kind of book that moved me on a cellular level-the kind I stayed up too late listening to, compulsively texted my friends about and mourned when it was over.

Between two kingdoms