This week an episode about memoirs. First up, how do you handle a diagnosis of cancer at age 22?

Celica Duod joins us to talk about her memoir between two kingdoms.

Then, what makes for a great comedian memoir?

The Times' comedy critic Jason Ziniman will be here to talk about some of his favorites.

Alexander Alter will give us an update from the publishing world. Plus, my colleagues

and I will talk about what we're reading. This is the Book Review podcast from the New

York Times. It's February 19th. I'm Pamela Paul.

Celica Duod joins us now from rural New Jersey. Her first book is called Between Two Kingdoms,

a Memoir of a Life Interrupted. Celica, thanks for being here.

Thanks so much for having me, Pamela. So, this book came out originally, I believe,

from a blog that you did for the New York Times called Life Interrupted. Can you start with

how that blog came about and what it was about? So, I received a diagnosis of leukemia when I was 22.

And in those early weeks of being in the hospital and undergoing chemo, I had all kinds of

grand ambitions about what I was going to do with this strange time on bed rest. I had packed a suitcase

full of books, including War and Peace, which was on my bedside table. But, you know, as the

treatment began and the side effects started to set in, I had so little energy. I never read a

single one of those books. And a kind of despair began to sink in as I realized that my life

had bifurcated the resist before diagnosis and this after. And I really struggled to figure out

what I could possibly do from the confines of a hospital room. And so, I returned to something I'd

always leaned on in difficult times, just keeping a journal. And I wrote every day,

I'd made this commitment to myself and it didn't matter how good the quality of the writing was

or how long it was. Sometimes I wrote a couple sentences, sometimes just a word, occasionally the

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