I bought this book to satisfy the travel category, as the blurb said it was about the author’s 15,000 mile journey around the US following completion of her cancer treatment. However, most of the book is about her cancer diagnosis, treatment, and recovery, a different kind of journey, so it’s more memoir than travel.
As her adult life just beginning, Jaouad was diagnosed with a rare version of AML. Her life from ages 22-25 was all about that – being a cancer patient, a person with cancer, a person being treated for cancer. An aspiring writer, she took to journalling and then blogging about her experiences, eventually contributing to a column and video series for the New York Times called, “Life, Interrupted.” Her treatment involves chemotherapy, then a bone marrow transplant, then more chemo and still more chemo. Her writing about this time doesn’t focus on the details of the treatment, but on the experiences of her and those around her during the process: the boredom and anxiety of being in the hospital for so long; the gruelling role of caregiver taken on by her mother and her boyfriend (they’d only met 6 months earlier); the tension of trying to lead a “normal” life when being so physically compromised; befriending other patients only to lose them one by one. The raw honesty in her writing combined with the reach of the NYT meant she heard from many people in response – others with cancer but also people experiencing loss and death in a variety of ways.
While still vulnerable physically, Jaouad decides in 2015ish to embark on her trip around the US, meeting up with several of the people who wrote to her. After learning how to drive, she borrows a friend’s car and, starting from New York City, sets out on a big loop around the country. Her objective is to reckon with how to move forward in life beyond cancer. She draws on Susan Sontag’s description of those with illness: “Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick.” Jaouad considers herself between those kingdoms – not quite sick (at least not as much as she was) and not quite well. Along the way, she journals and philosophizes, and adopts a new direction: forward. She’s in the early years of a relationship (with Jon Baptiste) and at the start of a writing and speaking career as a survivor and advocate. At the same time, she continues to be a cancer patient (the cancer has returned a few times), while developing more writing and guidance for others on the purpose and value of journalling.
The book ends with her return to New York and her decision to go all-in on her relationship with Jon. I was impressed at the restraint of this, ending the story in 2015. It would have been tempting to extend the writing, but she remains focused on telling this story: ending the interruption of her life and reckoning with living between the two kingdoms. The short epilogue brings the reader mostly up to date on the main characters and situations, prior to the return of her cancer in 2021.
I did enjoy this book, despite the grim topic. Jaouad’s disarming honesty and clear writing make the story gripping and the journeys filled with meaning and emotion. It took a while to warm up to her. As a young adult, there is a moderate sense of entitlement coming through in her relationships with her caregivers as a passive-aggressiveness bordering on selfishness, as she takes her anger about the unfairness of her situation out on them. This is not dominant but there as an undercurrent much of the time. While understandable, it doesn’t make her the most sympathetic narrator, but I think that’s the point – she is laying bare her own role in creating the challenges of her life beyond her illness, a mea culpa to those who loved her during that time. I felt the section about her travels could have been a bit longer, with more details about what she saw along the way.
I will poke around on her blog site (although it is now quite elaborately built around her journalling guidance), and may seek out her other writing, as she is eloquent and engaging.
Fate: little book library.
7 – debut
8 – female author
23 – memoir
25 – new author to me
rclr 
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