Wild Card with Rachel Martin
Episode: Suleika Jaouad (November 20, 2025)
Podcast: NPR

Episode Overview

This episode of Wild Card with Rachel Martin features Suleika Jaouad, writer, artist, and author of the best-selling memoir Between Two Kingdoms. Through a unique format where guests draw provocative questions from a deck of cards, Rachel and Suleika engage in a candid conversation about identity, creativity, illness, loss, and the rituals that sustain us. Suleika shares intimate reflections about living with chronic illness, her creative lineage, profound losses, love, and the meaning she continues to make from adversity.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

Suleika’s Teen Years & Identity

[03:12 - 06:00]

• Admiring Teenage Self: Suleika reflects on rereading her old diaries, noting their mix of wild honesty and self-mythology:
  • “They're full of lies about boys I said I kissed, that I never did... fictional tales about the aspirational woman I was trying to become.” (Suleika, 03:16)
  • Suleika admires her younger self’s freedom to experiment with identity.
  • She describes herself as an “angst-ridden” teenager, influenced by her father's profession (French literature professor) and early feelings of being an outsider:
    • “I was the kid who showed up on the first day of kindergarten not speaking a word of English…by the time I got to be a teenager, I sort of leaned into my misfit hood and started to have fun with it.” (Suleika, 05:23)

Lessons from Her Parents & The Creative Lineage

[06:11 - 11:18]

• Inheriting Daydreaming & Creative Practice:

  • From her father: “Intentional daydreaming. Big daydreaming.” (Suleika, 07:00)
  • From her mother: The value of making “a big, glorious mess” and not being scared of mistakes.
  • Beautiful memory: Transforming the attic into a studio, learning pointillism with Q-tips, and deep encouragement to experiment freely.
  • “She’s someone who really doesn’t believe in mistakes in creative work. She’s someone who always says, like, whenever you think it's bad, that's actually where the energy is. Keep moving deeper into that.” (Suleika, 07:44)

• Creative Gifts During Illness:

  • Suleika’s family coped during her cancer treatment with a “Hundred Day Project,” where her dad wrote daily childhood memories—a practice that brought them closer and inspired him to work on a memoir.
  • “It was such a gift to get to know the version of my dad as a child, the version of my dad at around the same age I was.” (Suleika, 11:04)

Appreciating Beauty & Transforming the Ordinary

[12:12 - 14:05]

• Early Experience of Beauty:
  • Suleika shares how she created art installations in her childhood bedroom: hanging a branch above her bed as an awning and decorating it:
    • “It was the sense of finding something that one might consider trash worthy and transforming it into something that created a sense of magic.” (Suleika, 13:16)

The Power of Creative Practice

[15:36 - 18:31]

• The Book of Alchemy:
  • A project fusing her story with essays and prompts by guest writers. Ash Parsons Story’s prompt, “just 10 images,” particularly influenced Suleika, especially after her recurrence of leukemia.
  • Suleika uses this exercise to notice and remember fleeting, beautiful moments: “When I push myself to stream of consciousness, write 10 images, 10 scenes, what it often yields are these quiet, sweet, beautiful moments that I wouldn’t have otherwise noted.” (Suleika, 17:28)

Recurrence of Illness & Transformation

[18:31 - 21:26]

• Reflection on facing leukemia for the third time:
  • “The bad thing is that I’ve been through this three times. And the good thing is that I’ve been through this three times. And so I feel like I have the tools that I didn’t have at 22 to navigate this.” (Suleika, 18:39)
  • Sharing a friend’s definition: “Transformation equals liberation plus loss.” Inclusive of insights on clarity, liberation from expectation, and the ephemerality of time.

Visual Journaling & The Alchemy of Pain

[21:26 - 23:40]

• Use of painting as a coping tool during treatment, especially when temporary vision loss made writing difficult.
  • “I started keeping a visual journal…The second I started to paint those hallucinations, it became interesting to me. They became beautiful.” (Suleika, 22:22)
  • Anecdote: a hospital cleaner lingering in her room for the atmosphere, calling it “like a weird art gallery.”

Insights: Relationships and Unlearning

[23:54 - 29:59]

• Unlearning Limiting Beliefs in Love:
  • Suleika never believed she’d have a long-term relationship or marriage due to her transient upbringing; John Batiste (husband) changed her perspective.
    • “John said…the goal is not to have a perfect relationship. The goal is to be a person who shows up and who puts in the work when things get hard, because they will get hard.” (Suleika, 25:32)
  • Narrating their spontaneous wedding before her second bone marrow transplant: a “kind of defiance…you double down on love in the face of life’s knife twists and plot twists.” (Suleika, 28:37)

The Power of Laughter, Sound, and Connection

[30:41 - 31:54]

• Favorite sound: John’s spontaneous laughter around the house:
  • “Just hearing that raucous hooting and cackling is enough to just get me laughing. I don’t even need to be in on the joke.” (Suleika, 31:54)

Beliefs: Showing Up with Illness & Ritual

[33:44 - 39:56]

• Balancing Limitations and Honesty:

  • Suleika on being open with friends about her ability to attend events: “I am now trying to be really honest about that…and so when I make a plan…I’ll say there is a 50, 50 chance realistically that I’m going to be able to show up.” (Suleika, 34:06)
  • Recognizing value in showing up for loved ones in creative, non-physical ways.

• Personal Rituals as Spiritual Practice:

  • Describes herself as “very ritualistic,” cherishing early mornings for journaling and nature walks with her dogs:
    • “No matter what, I have my things that I do in the morning. I’m a very early riser and I really treasure those early morning hours…where I get to be alone, alone with my thoughts.” (Suleika, 37:00)
  • Her husband’s Christian practice and their shared respect for different spiritual traditions: “We have… this kind of little closet style room that’s a prayer room. And he goes in there and reads scripture every morning. I go in there and I do my journaling.” (Suleika, 39:55)

Loss, Grief, and Creating Meaning

[40:55 - 49:26]

• Staying Connected to Lost Friends:

  • Suleika remembers friends lost to illness: “I would experience any amount of grief to experience those loves… the depth of your grief is the measure of how much you loved.” (Suleika, 41:27)
  • She finds them again through creative acts, especially writing and painting.

• Survivor’s Burden:

  • Grappling with being the one who lived: “The awful thing about watching someone you love die is you get older and they stay the same age.” (Suleika, 45:30)
  • Learning and carrying forward not just their experience with illness, but their artistry and agency: “My illness is the least interesting thing about me. What I admired about them was not the mere fact that they were sick… it's how they responded to their illness.” (Suleika, 46:56)

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “Life is not a binary. We're not either happy or sad or well or unwell. Most of us are existing somewhere in the messy middle and trying to hold it all.” (Suleika, 30:22)
• “Transformation equals liberation plus loss.” (Elizabeth Gilbert, quoted by Suleika, 19:08)
• On showing up despite illness: “You don’t have to show up always with your body, but there are gestures that one can make, especially…in moments of celebration or grief.” (Suleika, 36:00)
• “The Buddhists say meditation is remembering. For me… whatever it is that I’m doing in the journal…feels like a kind of remembering.” (Suleika, 38:31)
• “[Painting hallucinations] became beautiful…That sense of permission to return to those early loves from childhood, not just as side hobbies…but as something that I really make space for.” (Suleika, 23:23 & 23:40)

Emotional Touchstones (with Timestamps)

• On facing chronic illness and plans:
  “[I] have a lot of anxiety around making plans. I want to be a person who says, yes, I will be there…I don’t always know in advance if I’m going to be able to be there.” (Suleika, 34:06)

• On creative transformation amid suffering:
  “It’s that notion of alchemy…that sense of transmutation where something seemingly worthless, like lead, can be transformed into something valuable like gold.” (Suleika, 21:38)

• On love and marriage amid crisis:
  “This is what you do in the face of these things, you double down on love.” (John Batiste, quoted by Suleika, 28:37)

Final Reflection: Memory Time Machine

[49:57 - 51:34]

• Suleika would revisit a night camping under Nebraska stars with her dog post-treatment, feeling “a real sense of delight and pleasure in my own company” for the first time.
  • “May we all feel that at some point in our lives, may we all take a solo road trip. I really think it should be a rite of passage.” (Suleika, 51:13)

Structure of Suleika’s Conversation

1. Memories: Teenage years, parents, beauty, creative resilience.
2. Insights: Relationships, unlearning, laughter, vulnerability.
3. Beliefs: Showing up with illness, honesty, spiritual routine, ritual.
4. Grief & Connection: Navigating loss, survivor’s guilt, creative legacy.
5. Closing Reflection (“Memory Time Machine”): Embracing solitude and self-acceptance.

Recommended Next Listen

• Episode with Jason Reynolds – “It really resonated with me and I know a lot of you. I still think about that conversation all the time.” (Rachel, 00:53)

For those seeking a soulful, honest, and creative look at how we live, love, make art, and endure—the conversation with Suleika Jaouad on Wild Card is rich with wisdom, tenderness, and hard-won hope.