Suleika Jaouad

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Suleika Jaouad – Life, Writing, and Resilience


Suleika Jaouad (born July 5, 1988) is an American writer, advocate, and motivational speaker. Her memoir Between Two Kingdoms, her New York Times column Life, Interrupted, and her creative resilience through illness have inspired readers around the world.

Introduction

Suleika Jaouad is a writer, advocate, and survivor whose work transforms personal suffering into a universal lens for healing, creativity, and meaning. After being diagnosed with leukemia at age 22, she documented her medical journey in a New York Times column and later expanded her voice through essays, a bestselling memoir, and public speaking. Through candid storytelling and a poetic sensibility, Jaouad invites readers to live fully amid uncertainty.

Early Life and Education

  • Born: July 5, 1988, in New York City, U.S.A.

  • She was born to a Tunisian father and Swiss mother.

  • As a young musician, she studied double bass through the Juilliard School’s pre-college program.

  • She attended Princeton University, majoring in Near Eastern Studies, and earning her AB with highest honors.

  • Later, she earned an MFA in writing and literature from Bennington College (2020).

Breakthrough & Writing Career

Diagnosis & Life, Interrupted

  • Shortly after graduating, she was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia (at 22).

  • During treatment, she began writing the New York Times column “Life, Interrupted”, reporting from the hospital bed. The video series based on it won an Emmy Award.

  • The column and series gave voice to young adults facing life-altering illness and the in-between state of wellness and sickness.

Memoir: Between Two Kingdoms

  • In 2021, she published Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted. It became a New York Times bestseller and has been translated into over 20 languages.

  • The book explores life before diagnosis, the medical journey, and the struggle to live meaningfully after remission.

The Book of Alchemy

  • Her second book, The Book of Alchemy: A Creative Practice for an Inspired Life, was published on April 22, 2025. It reflects on creativity and healing as a form of transformation.

Advocacy, Projects & Public Role

  • Jaouad founded The Isolation Journals, a weekly newsletter and creative community begun during the COVID-19 pandemic. It encourages readers to transform life’s interruptions into art and connection.

  • She has served on Barack Obama’s Presidential Cancer Panel, and on nonprofit boards focused on bone marrow registry and healthcare equity.

  • Her essays, reporting, and reflections have appeared in major outlets—The New York Times Magazine, Vogue, The Atlantic, The Guardian, NPR, and more.

  • She is also an artist (watercolor work) and has exhibited visual work from her hospital tenure.

Personal Life

  • Jaouad is married to musician Jon Batiste. They reconnected after her diagnosis and married in February 2022.

  • Her illness recurred in 2021, requiring another bone marrow transplant; by 2024 she was fighting a third recurrence.

  • Her story is central to the Netflix documentary American Symphony, which chronicles her journey alongside her husband’s musical path.

Style, Themes & Philosophy

  • Jaouad writes with honesty, lyricism, and vulnerability, weaving illness narratives with reflections on identity, meaning, and resilience.

  • A recurring theme is the in-between: life neither fully before nor fully after illness, but straddling both.

  • She emphasizes creativity as survival—journaling, art, writing as tools to transmute pain into meaning.

  • Her advocacy centers on making space for voices often marginalized by illness and raising awareness for cancer survivors.

Selected Quotes

  • “What almost dying taught me about living.” (TED Talk title)

  • “I documented my odyssey of illness, healing, and self-discovery.”

  • “To transform the painful parts of our lives into something meaningful, useful, even beautiful.” (theme from The Book of Alchemy)

Lessons from Suleika Jaouad

  • Voice matters in suffering: Sharing one’s story can heal individually and collectively.

  • Creative practice transforms pain: Whether through journaling or art, creativity helps us process interruption and longing.

  • Resilience is ongoing: Healing often does not conclude; life continues with cycles of uncertainty.

  • Community & connection: Isolation becomes less oppressive through shared vulnerability.

  • Meaning arises amid fragility: She invites us to find purpose not after overcoming but within the journey itself.

Recent news about Jaouad
Articles by the author

Having cancer changed the way I ate and thought about food. My symptoms dictated my eating habits. The sores in my mouth and the bouts of nausea, for instance, stole the pleasure of eating and made it an ordeal. At some points in my treatment, eating wasn't even an option.

Suleika Jaouad

Before my diagnosis with leukemia, two years ago at the age of 22, I'd always excelled at making resolutions. But I was never as good at keeping them.

Suleika Jaouad

You know, illness is not something that ever crossed my mind until I got diagnosed with leukemia two years ago at the age of 22. And I don't take things for granted anymore.

Suleika Jaouad

With a Catholic mother and a Muslim father, I've always had a great interest in religion, but I've never practiced one myself. After I received a diagnosis of an aggressive form of leukemia at the age of 22, I put my faith in medicine.

Suleika Jaouad

For cancer patients like me, and for others who suffer from chronic or life-threatening illnesses, natural disasters don't put health on the back burner.

Suleika Jaouad

Today, at age 24, when my peers are dating, marrying and having children of their own, my cancer treatments are causing internal and external changes in my body that leave me feeling confused, vulnerable, frustrated - and verifiably unsexy.

Suleika Jaouad

The first time I fantasized about early retirement, I was 22 years old. It was a rainy spring morning in Paris, and as I waited for the Metro to take me to my new paralegal job, it occurred to me that I'd rather be sleeping in, or playing hooky at the movies, or sailing around the world.

Suleika Jaouad

So, you know, when I think of survival as a creative act, it's not trying to plaster over the isolation or to, you know, rewrite your predicament into something positive with a happy ending or some kind of neat resolution. It's writing into the unknown.

Suleika Jaouad