Join Suleika Jaouad as she presents her first book Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted. Joining Suleika in conversation is New York Times bestseller Tara Westover. Purchase a copy here: https://www.strandbooks.com/search-re...

A searing, deeply moving memoir of illness and recovery that traces one young woman's journey from diagnosis to remission and, ultimately, a road trip of healing and self-discovery.

When Jaouad finally walked out of the cancer ward--after three and a half years 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. Sp 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 an Emmy Award-winning writer, speaker, cancer survivor, and activist. She served on Barack Obama's President's Cancer Panel, and her advocacy work, reporting, and speaking has been featured at the United Nations, on Capitol Hill, and on the TED Talk main stage. When she's not on the road with her 1972 Volkswagen camper van and her rescue dog Oscar, she lives in Brooklyn.

Tara Westover was born in Idaho in 1986. She received her BA from Brigham Young University in 2008 and was subsequently awarded a Gates Cambridge Scholarship. She earned an MPhil from Trinity College, Cambridge, in 2009, and in 2010 was a visiting fellow at Harvard University. She returned to Cambridge, where she was awarded a PhD in history in 2014. Her first book, Educated, was a #1 New York Times bestseller and has remained on the list for more than a year. It was a finalist for a number of national awards, including two from the National Book Critics Circle Awards, as well as the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award. President Barack Obama and Bill Gates both recommended Educated on their annual reading lists, and the American Booksellers Association named Educated the Adult Nonfiction Book of the Year.

Recorded February 11, 2021