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Virtual Event – Suleika Jaouad
February 24, 2021 @ 7:00 pm - 8:00 pm
Magic City Books is proud to welcome Suleika Jaouad for a virtual event in celebration of her best selling book, Between Two Kingdoms, a searing, deeply moving memoir of illness and recovery that traces her journey from diagnosis to remission and, ultimately, a road trip of healing and self-discovery.
Suleika will be joined in conversation by Ruthie Lindsey, cohost of the Unspoken podcast and author of There I Am.
This free event will be hosted on the Zoom platform and Facebook Live. To register in advance for the event on Zoom, visit: https://magiccitybooks.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_SN2wZRdVTEGougrTCpABcw.
After you register, you will receive a confirmation email with details on how to join the event on Wednesday, February 24 at 7:00 CT.
Between Two Kingdoms is available at Magic City Books. You can purchase a copy in store or online here: https://magiccitybooks.square.site/product/between-two-kingdoms/451.
About Between Two Kingdoms
In the summer after graduating from college, Suleika Jaouad was preparing, as they say in commencement speeches, 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.
It started with an itch–first on her feet, then up her legs, like a thousand invisible mosquito bites. Next came the exhaustion, and the six-hour naps that only deepened her fatigue. Then a trip to the doctor and, a few weeks shy of her twenty-third birthday, a diagnosis: leukemia, with a 35 percent chance of survival. Just like that, the life she had imagined for herself had gone up in flames. By the time Jaouad flew home to New York, she had lost her job, her apartment, and her independence. She would spend much of the next four years in a hospital bed, fighting for her life and chronicling the saga in a column for The New York Times.
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.
How would she reenter the world and live again? How could she reclaim what had been lost? Jaouad embarked–with her new best friend, Oscar, a scruffy terrier mutt–on a 100-day, 15,000-mile road trip across the country. She set out to meet some of the strangers who had written to her during her years in the hospital: a teenage girl in Florida also recovering from cancer; a teacher in California grieving the death of her son; a death-row inmate in Texas who’d spent his own 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.
Suleika Jaouad is the author of the instant bestselling memoir, Between Two Kingdoms. She wrote the Emmy Award-winning New York Times column “Life, Interrupted” and her work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, Vogue, and NPR, among others. A highly sought-after speaker, her mainstage TED Talk was one of the ten most popular of 2019 and has nearly four million views. 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; over 100,000 people from around the world have joined.
A speaker, author, podcast host, and social media figure, Ruthie Lindsey travels the globe sharing her story, empowering others to find purpose in their pain and to look for beauty in the midst of their sacred wounds. Her new memoir, There I Am: The Journey from Hopelessness to Healing, from Touchstone/Simon and Schuster debuted April 21, 2020.
