I was desperate to move forward with my life and to move forward from this experience. I felt like I had told that story in the form that I needed to, which was this New York Times column. When I came out of cancer treatment after nearly four years, I was determined to write about anything other than illness. Suleika: Like a lot of writers, it was always my dream to write a book, to hopefully write many books. When did you know that you were going to write a book about your experience, or did you kind of know all along? Obviously, you had been publishing your column in The New York Times and even won an Emmy for the videos that accompanied it. The first inkling that this would become a book, for the reader at least, is when you visit a psychic - I can't remember where, maybe New Mexico or something - who says that you will write a book one day. Zibby: I know that along the way you had been writing in your journal because you tell us in the book that you have been doing that. This book was chronicling that journey from the kingdom of the sick back towards the kingdom of the well and the in-between place that I found myself in. More than that, it's about what happened after and about what we do when our lives are upended and we have to figure out how to live again and what that looks like and what the way forward is going to be.

I was diagnosed with leukemia when I was twenty-two. It's really the story of my time in the kingdom of the sick. It tells the story of my twenties, which were a very eventful decade in my life, as they are for lots of people. Suleika: Between Two Kingdoms is a memoir. Zibby: For those who don't know what Between Two Kingdoms is about, would you give the quickie summary of it, please? I have so much respect for you as a writer and the way you did this memoir.

I just feel all this love towards you even though I don't know you. Zibby: I literally am overwhelmed by anticipation at being able to talk to you. Thank you for coming on 'Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books' to discuss Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted. Now, she shares her journey in Between Two Kingdoms, one of Zibby's favorite memoirs to date, and challenges readers to live their lives in technicolor even when everything has been upended. As she moved through her twenties and from the kingdom of the sick to that of the well, Suleika documented her life in both a personal journal and a column in the New York Times. 'We tell the story we need to tell, and we have no business trying to avoid it.' When Suleika Jaouad was twenty-two years old, she was diagnosed with leukemia and was only given a thirty-five percent chance to live.

Suleika between two kingdoms