“Grief is a ghost that visits without warning,” she writes. What Jaouad is addressing is guilt and desolation it is the experience of being left behind. “Taking Melissa’s ashes to the place she loved most doesn’t lessen the pain of losing her,” she writes, “but it has shown me a way that I might begin to engage with my grief.” Reconciliation, in other words - but of the most clear-eyed variety, with no illusions about what may be preserved. ‘I’m not ready,’ she’d say.” Late in the book, Jaouad carries a vial of Melissa’s ashes to sprinkle at the Taj Mahal. She writes most movingly about her fellow travelers, the friends she made (and lost) in treatment: the poet Max Ritvo, dead at 25 from Ewing’s sarcoma her artist friend Melissa, who “raged as death grew more imminent. He sits down to talk about his memoir, “The Answer Is. He opens up in new memoirĪlex Trebek is happy being an uncle figure in your life, and he’s not afraid to describe cancer’s personal toll. Even my lips looked drained of life force.”īooks Alex Trebek was ‘ready to pack it in’ during cancer battle. 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'

Beyond two kingdoms