Suleika Jaouad Books in Order

Suleika Jaouad was born in New York City to a Tunisian father and a Swiss mother, and she spent much of her childhood in Saratoga Springs, New York, with stretches in Tunisia and Switzerland along the way. French was the language of home when she was little. As a kid who often felt caught between cultures, she started keeping a journal in elementary school, partly to make sense of herself and partly to collect the English phrases she wanted to try out in daily life.

Before writing became the center of her public life, music was a serious part of it. She studied double bass at Juilliard's pre-college program, then went on to Princeton, where she earned a degree in Near Eastern studies with highest honors. Later, she completed an MFA in writing and literature at Bennington College.

At first, she imagined a different future.

After college, Jaouad moved to Paris and wanted to become a foreign correspondent. Then, at 22, she was diagnosed with leukemia. The illness upended everything, and during years of treatment she began writing from her hospital bed, turning private fear, boredom, anger, and hope into the New York Times column and video series Life, Interrupted.

That change in direction shaped the work many readers know her for now. In Between Two Kingdoms, she writes about diagnosis, treatment, remission, and the long, uneasy period after survival, when everyone expects normal life to resume but your inner life has not caught up. The book also follows her cross-country road trip with her dog, Oscar, as she tries to figure out what healing might actually mean.

She stayed with the hard question instead of rushing past it.

Her second book, The Book of Alchemy, grows out of her lifelong journaling practice. Jaouad mixes her own reflections with prompts and contributions from other writers and artists, making a case for creative work as something useful in ordinary life, not just in moments of crisis. Readers who like her books often respond to the same qualities in both, plainspoken honesty, curiosity, and a willingness to admit that growth can look messy.

Certain themes keep returning in her writing. Illness, recovery, uncertainty, reinvention, and the strange gap between what a body goes through and what language can hold. She is also drawn to community, to the people who show up during hard seasons, and to the small rituals that help someone begin again. Even when the subject is heavy, her tone stays open and searching.

In 2020, she started The Isolation Journals, a creative community built around weekly prompts and reflection during the pandemic. More recently, after a leukemia recurrence and treatment complications that affected her vision, she turned deeply to painting, especially watercolor, and began showing her visual art. She has also continued speaking and writing about illness, creativity, and the lives people rebuild after interruption. Along with her husband, musician Jon Batiste, she was featured in the documentary American Symphony. These days, her work moves across memoir, journalism, art, and guided reflection, but it keeps returning to the same big question, how do you make a life inside uncertainty?