Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted

by Suleika Jaouad

The diagnosis had formed an irreparable fracture: my life before, and after.

Later I would come to see this incident—and so many others along the surreal journey of contending with cancer—as darkly comic. But in the moment, I was weighted heavily with a sense of responsibility. It had only been forty-eight hours, but already my diagnosis had overturned our lives, yanking us all through a trapdoor into this strange, confusing land.

Just three months earlier, the oncology unit had felt like a foreign country; now, perversely, I felt at home among the chorus of beeping IV monitors and the bald-headed patients.