Suleika Jaouad and Mitchell S. Jackson on Between Two Kingdoms

The summer after graduating from college, Suleika Jaouad was preparing to enter “the real world.” She had fallen in love and moved to Paris to pursue her dream of becoming a war correspondent. The real world she found, however, would take her into a very different kind of conflict zone: a few weeks shy of her twenty-third birthday, she was diagnosed with leukemia and given a 35 percent chance of survival. She would spend much of the next four years in a hospital bed, fighting for her life. When Jaouad finally walked out of the cancer ward—after countless rounds of chemo, a clinical trial, and a bone marrow transplant—she was, according to the doctors, cured. But as she would soon learn, a cure is not where the work of healing ends; it’s where it begins. She had spent the past 1,500 days in desperate pursuit of one goal—to survive. And now that she’d done so, she realized that she had no idea how to live.

She embarked on a 100-day, 15,000-mile road trip across the country to meet some of the strangers who had written letters to her during her years in the hospital: a teenage girl in Florida also recovering from cancer; a teacher in California grieving the loss of her son; a death-row inmate in Texas who had spent years confined to a room. What she learned on this trip is that the divide between sick and well is porous, that the vast majority of us will travel back and forth between these realms throughout our lives. Between Two Kingdoms is a profound chronicle of survivorship and a fierce, tender, and inspiring exploration of what it means to begin again. She discusses her journey with author Mitchell S. Jackson. 

Suleika Jaouad wrote the Emmy Award-winning New York Times column “Life, Interrupted” and has written reported features, essays and commentary for The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, Vogue, and NPR, among other publications. She is also the creator of the Isolation Journals, a community creativity project founded during the Covid-19 pandemic to help others convert isolation into artistic solitude.

Mitchell S. Jackson is the author of The Residue Years and Survival Math: Notes on an All-American Family, which tells the story of his own family and his tumultuous youth in Portland, Oregon. Part self-reflection and part social critique, Survival Math illuminates the systemic forces of race and class that have shaped the lives of countless disenfranchised Americans, in a candid, lyrical, and thrillingly alive portrait of a family and a community.

Please register for this free Zoom event. Registered audience members will receive a Zoom link prior to the event. Purchase Between Two Kingdoms from our bookselling partner Greenlight Bookstore here for in-store pickup or direct-to-home shipping!