Suleika Jaouad didn’t intend to become a proselytizer for journaling, despite having the utmost respect for her own ragtag collection of Moleskines and marbled composition notebooks.
“I don’t think it’s melodramatic to say that journaling has saved my life,” Jaouad said. “But when I hear someone use the words ‘creative practice,’ some part of me is inclined to roll my eyes.”
Before we explore her change of heart, a few notes on terminology: “Journaling” is one of those squishy newfangled verbs like “friending” or “tantruming.” Just go with it. Also, a journal is not to be confused with a diary. The latter is a linear accounting of daily life, often bedecked with a lock that’s no match for a sibling with a bobby pin. The former invites tangents, musings and half-baked ideas. Think of it as a sketchbook for language (although drawings are welcome too). In short, a diary is a fenced yard; a journal is an open field.
Jaouad, 36, has cavorted in that field for as long as she can remember. She writes every day. She isn’t precious about it. She journals the way a runner stretches or a musician practices scales. She’s filled hundreds of notebooks, now piled in trunks and closets, on the floor of her home office in Brooklyn and in bins behind the couch where she sat during an interview, cradling her dog, Lentil, atop a fringed pillow.
But this writing ritual took on new significance in late 2021 when, after a near decade-long remission, Jaouad had a recurrence of leukemia. Her first round was well documented: She’d written about it in Life, Interrupted, a column for The New York Times; in “Between Two Kingdoms,” a best-selling memoir; and for The Isolation Journals, her Substack community which started as a 100-day journaling challenge.
The cancer returned as Jaouad and her husband, Jon Batiste, whom she met as a teenager at band camp, were filming a documentary about a classical work he was composing. The movie, “American Symphony,” ended up following Jaouad’s treatment on a parallel track.
Her private grappling happened in her journals. They inspired “The Book of Alchemy,” coming out on April 22.
When Jaouad arrived at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in 2022 for her second bone marrow transplant, she brought a gray felt diaper caddy stuffed with reading material, art supplies and a quartet of notebooks. One was for medical jottings and notes on doctors’ visits. Another was for character sketches and overheard conversations. The third contained Jaouad’s half of a shared journal with Batiste, in which they exchange letters when they’re apart. Finally, there was Jaouad’s personal journal, where she planned to write what she couldn’t say aloud.
“I was like, I’ve got this,” Jaouad said. “I’ve done this before. I’m going to do the exact same thing that worked for me the first time around.”
Then her vision blurred, thanks to a cocktail of medications. She started having hallucinations and nightmares. Instead of reaching for a pen, she grabbed a paintbrush.
“The only way I knew how to navigate that immense upheaval and uncertainty was to try to collaborate with it,” Jaouad said. “I decided to keep a visual journal.”
She pointed to the wall behind her couch where a procession of watercolors climbed, two by two, all the way to the ceiling: “These were the originals, these paintings.”
In one, a mermaid dangles from the mouth of a heron. In another, a pregnant figure stares down a snake. Several images feature IV lines. Taken as a whole, the images look like framed calendar pages from a year in hell. They’re also eerily, ethereally beautiful.
“Not only did it defang the fear, it made the nightmares interesting,” Jaouad said of her watercolor jag. “I became excited for my nightmares. They were fodder. They were creative grist.”
Eventually Jaouad started writing again, but she held onto the paintings, and to the solace that came from those outpourings. She began to reconsider a book idea she’d dismissed as “unserious and lacking in rigor.”
To be clear, “The Book of Alchemy” isn’t a how-to manual, a self help book or a guided journal. (The only tense moment of our interview came when I asked Jaouad if she’d considered a workbook approach. She had not.)
Her 336-page, pleasingly chunky tome is divided into 10 chapters, covering subjects such as memory, fear, seeing and love. Jaouad sets up each one with an autobiographical essay, followed by a series of shorter pieces from a hundred different contributors, complete with creative prompts.
Some are simple: Describe a day in the future. Write about a public figure you’ve been fascinated with from afar. Write about your relationship to your hands. Others are more complicated: George Saunders’s four-step instructions for writing a short story call to mind a recipe where you realize too late that you were supposed to make creme fraiche from scratch.
Jaouad’s table of contents includes more stars than the credits of “Love Actually,” although hers are of the literary variety, including Ann Patchett, Salman Rushdie, Elizabeth Gilbert, Lena Dunham and John Green. Then there are unexpected contributors: Photographers and a philanthropist, a hospice volunteer and a Lutheran pastor, an Olympic speedskater and the founder of a surf school. A milliner. A prisoner. In some ways, theirs are the most powerful pieces in the collection, since they come from people who aren’t writers with a capital W. These essays prove Jaouad’s point: that journaling is an equal opportunity form of expression, regardless of experience or age.
“The youngest contributor, at the time, was 6,” Jaouad said. “The oldest is in their 90s.” (That’s Gloria Steinem.)
Jaouad didn’t approach Green — whose novel, “The Fault in Our Stars,” was a lifeline after her first diagnosis — until two days before her deadline.
Green understood the assignment. He delivered a meditation on things unseen yet somehow envisioned — a dodo bird, the root system of a tree, the inner workings of the human heart. His prompt: “Write about what you’ve never seen until you feel like you can, in some way, see it.”
“Writing is my way of collecting and organizing my thoughts,” Green said in an interview. “What did Mr. Rogers say? ‘Anything mentionable is manageable’? Journaling helps me make things mentionable.”
A particularly moving essay comes from Jennifer Leventhal, a caregiver adviser for Memorial Sloan Kettering. In March 2020, her 25-year-old daughter Danielle, who was in treatment for her third recurrence of a rare sarcoma, asked her mother to join her in the daily creativity project from The Isolation Journals.
“I agreed,” Leventhal said in an interview. “I agreed to a lot of things that were outside my comfort zone. Anything that would distract her, or bring comfort or pleasure, was a yes for me.”
When Jaouad prompted followers to to compose a letter to a stranger, Leventhal immediately thought of a mother she’d seen in a hospital waiting room with her young adult son. Writing to this fellow caregiver, she said, helped her “shift toward acceptance and, later, gratitude for all the ways that it wasn’t so hard for us.”
Danielle died a year later, leaving her own journals to her mother.
“The Book of Alchemy” can be read linearly, as a narrative, or dipped into for inspiration. Some parts read like a memoir; others, like the syllabus for a class with a well-deserved waiting list. With its something-for-everyone approach, Jaouad’s book is bound to bring new writers to the fold; after all, you don’t need to be a person of words to journal any more than you need to be Katie Ledecky to practice freestyle.
“My hope is that it reaches people who are in between, who are in transition,” Jaouad said, “whether that’s the transition from graduation to the ‘real world,’ whether it’s someone like me who’s grappling with illness or some other heartbreak that’s upended their life.”
In August, Jaouad learned that her cancer is back. “When you learn for the third time that you have leukemia, that’s the kind of uncertainty that can make it hard to get out of bed in the morning,” she said. But “the goal is not to find an answer, to reach some distant point on the horizon. It’s to continuously experiment and explore and reflect and refine what emerges.”
That’s what her journals are for.
Elisabeth Egan is a writer and editor at the Times Book Review. She has worked in the world of publishing for 30 years.
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