“Terrible” Movies, Artist Diaries, and Blogposts: The Influence of the Young Person’s Long-Term Illness Narrative
As a former elementary educator and current teacher educator, what stands out to me the most in Jaouad’s (2021) Between Two Kingdoms is the author’s longing for representation. Throughout the work, Jaouad yearns for the narratives of other young adults who have had cancer. I was especially struck when she discusses binge watching a Kate Hudson movie called A Little Bit of Heaven (Kessell, 2011). This is not the type of media one would expect someone to connect deeply with. While Jaouad describes the movie as “terrible” she also says, it was “one of the only depictions of cancer in youth that I had come across” (p. 98). She explains how she watched the film several times because it allowed her to “face the one topic” that friends and family wouldn’t discuss with her — the possibility of not surviving (p. 98). For Jaouad, this “terrible” movie was what multicultural children’s literature scholar, Dr. Rudine Sims-Bishop (1990) describes as a mirror text. In other words, this book reflected Jaouad’s life and elements of her identity.
Jaouad’s experience connecting with Hudson’s portrayal in A Little Bit of Heaven echoes empirical research on the entertainment narratives of young adults with cancer. In their interview study of 25 young adults with cancer, Reffner Collins and colleagues (2023) found that “entertainment narratives are memorable messages, and that helpful messages increased feelings of competence and validation, which could promote psychological adaptation to the disease” (p. 552). Further illustrating this body of research, Jaouad finds The Diary of Frida Kahlo as a mirror of her experience as a young person stuck in confinement due to illness. Jaouad describes how Kahlo’s (2005) story of creatively engaging with her misfortune “ignited something” (p. 108). In fact, Jaouad then becomes an avid consumer of the stories of creatives who “alchemized their suffering into creative grist” including Matisse, Proust and Dahl (pp. 108- 109). For Jaouad, these narratives serve not only as a reflection of her own life, but they also offer her tangible ideas for how to process her own experience. We see this as the book progresses; Jaouad captures her own story as a young person with cancer through blogging and column writing. So not only does Jaouad seek out mirror texts, but she also becomes the creator of text that fellow cancer survivors engage with. Once out in the world, her writing also becomes what Dr. Bishop calls, a sliding glass door, or a text that allow readers to enter worlds that differ from their own.
Of course, no one story can capture a single experience, especially of something as complicated as going through a long-term illness. And, Jaouad’s story is from her perspective as a multiracial, multilingual, New Yorker- a major contrast from a Kate Hudson representation. What this book does is tell her intersectional narrative and open further opportunities for other young adult stories about cancer to be told — hopefully ones that offer insights into how social class differences, which was only vaguely touched on in the book, can so deeply impact the experience.