Martha Adams

The Right Book at the Right Time

I’m a strong believer in finding the books that speak to us even when we are not looking for them. Many of us have experienced this bit of magic that can happen to readers. Welcome to our new regular feature where bookish folks from all over weigh in on a special book that found them at exactly the right moment. You never know, this may be how you find what you or someone you know most need to read right now.

Today we hear from Martha Adams, publisher of Martha’s Monthly, a project she started here on Substack three years ago when she was deep in a struggle with her health. She began in a very different state of mind and with a very different set of expectations than those with which she finds herself today. This anniversary post reflects the journey she’s taken and she touches on it again in today’s interview when she talks about the book that altered how she looked at herself and the world.

Although I am still a relative newcomer to Martha Adams and her Substack, I feel at home there. She is a voracious reader with a very curious and very keen mind who loves a good discussion. She also reads more widely and more internationally than I do. I was intrigued most recently by less-than-glowing take on John of John by Douglas Stuart, a book I’d added to my TBR list after reading a positive review of it by Ron Charles. It will remain there because now I am curious to find out what I think.

And now, Martha’s RBRT interview:

What book found you when you needed it most?

Between Two Kingdoms by Suleika Jaouad

When and how did it find you (or how did you find it)?

I am always looking for books written by people who look nothing like me, stories that are about corners of the world I’ve never been to or events I know nothing about. I relentlessly seek the unknown in almost all of the books I read because I love to learn. But funnily enough, this book is an outlier to all of that. I found Between Two Kingdoms because I went looking for it. I was constantly searching for memoirs written by young women about being very sick. I can’t remember specifically how I found it, so it must have been the product of one of those many google searches I was doing.

Why it mattered

I was going through a horrendous time when I read this book. I had been diagnosed 18 months before with a chronic health condition that destroyed my life. At the time, I had been bed bound for almost two years aged just 23. I couldn’t work, see friends or have any sort of ‘life’. I was stuck in bed and would wake up every single day just waiting for it to be over. Life was extremely lonely and isolating. Conversations about sickness, especially chronic illness, are few and far between when it comes to young people and I felt like a complete pariah, utterly excluded from society, and by extension, life itself. One of the only things I could do in this time was read, and this desperation, paired with my ferocious relationship to reading, is what led me to Suleika’s book. Just like me, aged 22, her life changed forever when she was diagnosed with leukemia, and the book is about her enduring it all while also trying to understand ‘how’ to live.

I felt such a sense of kinship that we both experienced extreme sickness at the same age, and that she had also experienced such profound isolation and a life so radically different to her peers. Despite all the comfort and familiarity that Between Two Kingdoms gave me, it opened my eyes to how to ‘live’ with sickness. How to grow around it, how to try and not let your sense of self, or identity, suffer because of it. There are things you can do, a life you can live, while being sick. But before reading this book, I truly didn’t think any of that was possible. Jaouad wrote a column for the New York Times while going through treatment, and it showed me what was possible despite it all, the world that was still at my fingertips even though I was bedbound.

While I had started the book review newsletter a month before I read this, I don’t think I had truly considered what it could become, or what it could give me. After reading Between Two Kingdoms I quietly started to consider what was still possible while being sick, and the new relationships I could forge with people from my bed. Truthfully, I don’t think any of it would have happened to the extent it has without reading this book. Equally, it made me want to write my own project about experiencing such devastating sickness at a young age and I still hold onto that ambition and hope to do it one day. Jaouad’s attitude to life despite sickness was radical to me at the time, and something I carry with me to this day.

Would you read it again?

Maybe. I feel quite precious about the kismet between who I was at the exact time that I read this book. I read this book desperately, and used it for comfort and to try and find out who I could become despite all these traumatic things happening to me. Things have changed since then, and while I am still sick, my sense of self has evolved alongside sickness. A different version of me would be reading it today, or in the future, but I am sure I would still gain a lot from it - because long term health issues never leave you, no matter how much changes.

More on Martha

Martha Adams is a writer, book critic and founder of Martha’s Monthly, a newsletter that makes reading the world more accessible than ever, focused on covering predominantly translated books. The newsletter hosts a bi-monthly Book Club alongside sharing reviews of the books read every month.

I love talking to interesting people who are curious about the world we live in. I have recently conducted interviews with Antonella Lettieri about the art, culture and politics of the translation industry and Sophia Smith Galer about her new book, How To Kill A Language. Last year, I interviewed Ariel Saramandi about the island of Mauritius and her book Portrait of an Island on Fire.

You can find me on instagram here. My review of Between Two Kingdoms (which I must preface by saying was written a long time ago, before I became the writer I am now) can be found here. I live in the UK and am working hard on ensuring that my love for writing, interviews and research becomes my job.