039: Road Trip Epistemology

Suleika Jaouad, Pablo Neruda, sensory overload, getting older, ground truths, and of course, Doodle Dispatches

I picked up Suleika Jaouad’s Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted as this week’s reading because I thought it was a book about a cross-country road trip.

For once, I had judged a book by its cover, taking the photo of a woman, a dog, and a yellow camper-van as a visual summary of its contents.  I was going on a road trip this week, I thought, and so why not write about road trips? I could write about Jack Kerouac and Gary Snyder in Dharma Bums and John Steinbeck and his dog in Travels with Charley, and of childhood summers spent slightly carsick in the back of a Ford Fairmont, watching the alkali deserts of north central Wyoming recede as we wound our way west into the alpine meadows of Yellowstone and Teton National Parks.

But no. Suleika Jaouad’s book isn’t that kind of road trip book—it’s bigger than that. It’s a book about survival, a memoir of a twenty-something year old who battled cancer for four years and then, barely into remission, took a hundred day road trip to make sense of a life lived “between two kingdoms,” that is to say, between the kingdom of illness and loss and the kingdom of the living.