The bestselling author opens up about her early misdiagnosis, and how creativity has been part of healing.
When author Suleika Jaouad was diagnosed with leukemia at just 22 while she was living in Paris, the life she had planned was abruptly replaced by uncertainty. But in the face of an often invisible illness, brutal treatment, and a cancer recurrence, Suleika didn’t retreat. Instead, she began to write, offering honest, unfiltered dispatches from the world of chronic illness and recovery.
Her words—first through her New York Times column “Life, Interrupted,” and later in her memoir Between Two Kingdoms—gave voice to what so many endure in silence. Now, April 2025’s The Book of Alchemy celebrates the healing gift of creativity through the practice of journaling.
In this interview, we sit down with Suleika to talk about what it means to live in the “in-between” and to emerge—changed, scarred, but deeply alive. Hers is not just a story of illness, but of flourishing, connection, and the quiet strength it takes to lift others up while fighting life’s greatest battles.
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This interview has been edited for length.
The Healthy by Reader’s Digest: You’ve been working with Blood Cancer United. What does this collaboration mean to you?
Suleika Jaouad: I’ve been involved with the organization since my first diagnosis, and I was thrilled to be asked to help share the word about their new chapter. As someone who was initially diagnosed with myelodysplastic syndrome, a rare bone marrow disease, I’ve often felt that when we think of blood cancer, the focus tends to be only on leukemia and lymphoma. In reality, there are more than 100 blood cancers that fall under that umbrella. I’m deeply passionate about the advocacy work that Blood Cancer United does and honored to play a small role in it.
The Healthy: When you first presented with symptoms of acute myeloid leukemia at 22, you were misdiagnosed as having “burnout syndrome.” Can you share a bit about your journey to reaching an accurate diagnosis, and how being misdiagnosed affected you?
Suleika Jaouad: I was diagnosed at 22, but my health struggles began almost a year earlier with all kinds of symptoms. I would go to the doctor, get treated for the issue at hand, and be sent home with a prescription. This went on for months, and I began to feel that while people were treating individual issues, no one was looking at the bigger picture or taking me seriously.
That really came to light during a week-long hospitalization, where doctors ran every test imaginable except a bone marrow biopsy, which they deemed unnecessary for someone my age. There are a lot of subconscious and conscious biases, be it around gender or race, and when I emerged with a diagnosis of “burnout syndrome,” I felt deeply unsettled. I didn’t believe it, but the messaging from all corners was that my symptoms were in my head, a consequence of my lifestyle choices, and up to me to fix.
Of course, I would have much preferred burnout syndrome over my eventual diagnosis of myelodysplastic syndrome and later acute myeloid leukemia. But it was my first real lesson that as a patient you must advocate for yourself—push for answers and trust your intuition, even when the person with a medical degree says otherwise, and keep asking questions until you get clarity.
I have heard stories like my own from more patients than I can count. I wish I could say that when I had a recurrence a decade later, I had a different experience. But similarly, despite having a documented history of leukemia, despite having access to the very, very best medical care, once again, I had to push for a bone marrow biopsy and was told I was simply anxious. So, I remind others: if you push for answers and you’re wrong, the worst that happens is you’ve been a little annoying. But if you’re right, you can make a plan of action and move forward. That self-advocacy piece is hugely important.
The Healthy: You’ve now spent 15 years navigating the “two kingdoms” you reference in your memoir, living your life in periods of both sickness and health. What is something that people who have never experienced serious illness or survivorship misunderstand?
Suleika Jaouad: In moments of crisis, or when hearing about someone’s illness, many people freeze, unsure of what to say. Sometimes the impulse is to say nothing at all because when you don’t have the words, it’s easy to stay away. Maybe this is my bias as a writer, but I think what matters most is language and honesty. I have stopped using battle metaphors when it comes to describing my cancer experience because I don’t think that anybody loses their fight to cancer. I’ve paid close attention and written quite a bit about the language that the friends and family members of a sick person use.
I think the most supportive thing someone can say is often the simplest: I don’t know what to say, but I’m here. I think there can be this pressure in the pursuit to find the perfect words, to make the perfect gesture, to make some grand gesture that inevitably you end up putting off because it’s impossible to do. So if you like to cook, you make a casserole. If you like dogs, you offer to dog-sit for someone when they’re in the hospital. You do the thing that you already love to do and you offer some specific way of being of service.
In addition, there are so many incredible opportunities to volunteer at organizations like Blood Cancer United and I think that’s a really powerful way of supporting a loved one through illness.
The Healthy: You’ve written eloquently about how illness has at different times left you isolated and sparked connection. What helps to bridge that gap, if anything?
Suleika Jaouad: Isolation is an ongoing epidemic for many human beings but I think it’s especially true when you’re sick. For me, what’s helped bridge that gap is keeping a journal. From the very first night I spent in the hospital, my journal was a private reliquary where I could write the things I couldn’t say out loud, where I could write about my fears, about my feelings around my prognosis. In the act of writing those things down, of giving them language, it was easier for me to have the language to talk about them with my loved ones. When I did that, I learned that they were carrying the very same fears that I was carrying. So that notion of being in conversation with a self is so important to be in deeper conversation with the people around you.
The Healthy: Your newest release, The Book of Alchemy: A Creative Practice for an Inspired Life, explores the art of journaling. How has your journaling practice evolved over time, and how has it shaped your published work?
Suleika Jaouad: I used to think of journaling as paper and pen and when I got sick three years ago, the notion of journalism exploded open for me. I was undergoing a second bone marrow transplant, and my vision was temporarily impaired for about two weeks so I started keeping a visual journal. Now, my journaling looks all kinds of ways: it looks like a grocery list that turns into a poem; it looks like a doodle; it looks like three handwritten morning pages. That’s the beauty of the journal. It has no rules, there’s no right or wrong way to do it, and it also defies genre. For me, the journal is where all the first drafts of the most important conversations I’ve ever had live. It’s been the source material for my column and for both of my books. And it’s really been the foundation from which everything good in my life has grown.
The Healthy: What is the most unexpected insight you’ve uncovered through your own journaling practice?
Suleika Jaouad: Some of my favorite journal entries were ones I wrote while I was in the hospital because I felt like I had absolutely nothing to say. There was no change of scenery, I wasn’t participating in the world, and I felt like what I did have to say was inevitably going to be depressing. But with each difficult moment, I found myself writing about conversations I overheard among the nurses or little tales about fellow patients I was meeting. What those entries helped me see is that as much as we like to sort our lives into binaries of good and bad or happy and sad, much of life is a collision of both. For me, the journal is the place where I write all of it without feeling like I must sort it into categories and where I’m reminded of the fact that so much of our lives unfold in that glorious, messy middle.
The Healthy: The Netflix documentary American Symphony shows you and your husband, the seven-time Grammy Award-winning musician Jon Batiste, experiencing almost unimaginable highs and lows in 2022. Just as he was nominated for some of the highest accolades in music, you learned that your cancer had returned. How do you look back on this time of such extremes?
Suleika Jaouad: At the time, a friend of mine said describing that period as a roller coaster would be an insult to roller coasters. And that feels apt. I think I’m still on a bit of that roller coaster, but I think we’re always living extremes. Figuring out how to surf those peaks and valleys can be disorienting but for me, it really comes back to that daily journaling practice that I have as a way to capture those peaks and valleys, to make sense of them, and in doing so, to get my grounding, to feel the earth beneath my feet.
The Healthy: What do you hope readers take away from The Book of Alchemy?
Suleika Jaouad: My hope is that people will find their own creative alchemy in the context of their life. I’ve always been fascinated by the more traditional notion of alchemy, this idea that you can transform or transmute something considered worthless or base like lead into gold, because so often in life that’s the challenge we’re presented with. When I’ve been able to invoke that idea of creative alchemy, working on some new project or in the context of illness, it’s always led me somewhere interesting and new.
The Healthy: What are you working on now?
Suleika Jaouad: I’m working on a new book—a hybrid of paintings and essays—while also spending time with my dogs and taking it easy for a change.
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