How that came to be is part of her story. (Her boyfriend's devotion was so extraordinary that-spoiler alert-it's hard to believe she didn't end up marrying him. As she points out in her 2019 TED Talk, 'What Almost Dying Taught Me About Living,' after 1,500 days spent focused on survival, cancer had ravaged her body, her sense of self, and her relationship with the boyfriend who had so loyally supported her through her long medical ordeal. The year after her treatment ended, Jouad was newly single, frail, and lost. Her proactive, disciplined approach to life also helped Jaouad through what she has called the hardest part of her illness, which began after her cancer was declared in remission: figuring out how to live again. At Princeton, which she attended on full scholarship, she majored in Near Eastern studies, double-minored in French and gender studies, and received highest honors. As a high school student, she traveled solo by train to NYC early every Saturday morning, lugging her double-bass from her home in Saratoga to Juilliard's precollege program. In addition to English, she speaks French (her first language), Arabic, Spanish, and Farsi.

The daughter of a Tunisian-born French literature professor and a Swiss-born painter, Jaouad is a lifelong over-achiever. She had become a different sort of war correspondent.īetween Two Kingdoms, Jaouad's searching memoir of her illness and its aftermath, takes its title from an observation in Susan Sontag's Illness as Metaphor: 'Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick.' The line between them, Jaouad discovers, is more porous than most people realize. During her 'incanceration'-months in isolation to prevent infections-she documented her grueling treatments, first in a blog, then in a weekly column and videos for The New York Times called 'Life, Interrupted,' which generated an enormous response. Jaouad started writing about what it's like to face a life-threatening illness at 22. She quickly found herself fighting for her life in New York City cancer wards, where she was given a 35 percent chance of survival.

Instead, within months, she was diagnosed with a rare form of acute myeloid leukemia. When Suleika Jaouad graduated from Princeton in 2010, she was considering a career as a war correspondent.

Between two kingdoms book