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Learning about a stranger鈥檚 anguish and suffering can feel like voyeurism, even when that stranger invites us in. When reading Suleika Jaouad鈥檚 Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted, I repeatedly wanted to turn away rather than trespass on such intimate details in her battle with cancer. So many of us are un-practiced at engaging in someone else鈥檚 bodily pain, with their mortality 鈥� with visiting the kingdom of the sick when we are in the kingdom of the well. 

The format of the book forces us to sit in a feeling (quite unlike a social media post or news headline that we can graze past as we move on to more lighthearted content). By sharing the intensity of her experiences鈥攖he ones often made invisible by doors and shame鈥攊n a book-length memoir, Jaouad seeks human-to-human, unconditional empathy. And, hopefully, this empathy鈥攊n part a recognition that we will never know the full truth of another鈥檚 experience鈥攖ransfers to how we relate to people in our own lives. The art of written storytelling, like other textual arts as well as those visual, auditory, or performative, opens pathways to times, places, and experiences that we would otherwise not have access to. The arts offer a space to practice.

In Between Two Kingdoms, we read visceral descriptions of the sick body, which breaks the unspoken cultural agreement that we hide such experiences from public consumption. But who does this arrangement serve? Certainly not the sick. Even Jaouad, once she returns to the kingdom of the well, quickly loses her training at engaging with those in the kingdom of the sick. When learning of her friend Max鈥檚 fatal diagnosis, aware of its accompanying bodily, emotional, and psychological suffering, she does not confront it but instead chooses to keep him at bay; she admittedly 鈥渒now[s] better,鈥� yet would not immediately engage with his pain. He forgives her but states plainly: 鈥溾�業 do need you now.鈥欌�� (316)

Here and elsewhere, Jaouad recognizes and reflects upon her own flaws and missteps. She ignores her declining health in Paris; she bears down on turning her young romantic partnership into a patient-caregiver relationship that ultimately leads to its demise; she doesn鈥檛 fully address her family鈥檚 hardships. And this, too, might make us want to turn away: we realize, again and again, that our protagonist is not also our quintessential idol. Between Two Kingdoms is about real life, after all, and life off the pages has no clear heroes and villains, only difficult choices and fuzzy, complicated edges. But the reader roots for Jaouad to live, for her cancer-ridden friends to live, for her to find peace with her parents; maybe some readers root for Jaouad and Will鈥檚 relationship to thrive, or root for it to end amicably so both can move on, knowing Jaouad partners with Jon in the end. And we do all of this rooting not because of the author鈥檚 inherent 鈥済oodness鈥� or hero-worship but simply because Jaouad is human. So in sharing those intimate, agonizing details page after page, Jaouad offers space to practice engaging with someone else鈥檚 trauma, space to practice empathy.