The itch -- Métro, boulot, dodo -- Eggshells -- Space traveling and gaining momentum -- Stateside -- Bifurcation -- Fallout -- Damaged goods -- Bubble girl -- Stop-time -- Stuck -- Clinical trial blues -- The hundred-day project -- Tango to transplant -- On opposite ends of a telescope -- Hope Lodge -- Chronology of freedom -- The mutt -- Dreaming in watercolor -- A motley crew -- Hourglass -- The edges of us -- Done -- The in-between place -- Rites of passage -- Reentry -- For those left behind -- The long foray -- Written on the skin -- The value of pain -- Salsa and the survivalists -- "Doing a Brooke" -- Homegoing.

An Emmy Award-winning writer and activist describes the harrowing years she spent in early adulthood fighting leukemia and how she learned to live again while forging connections with other survivors of profound illness and suffering.

A few weeks shy of her twenty-third birthday, Jaouad received a diagnosis of leukemia, with a 35 percent chance of survival. She would spend much of the next four years in a hospital bed, fighting for her life and chronicling the saga in a column for The New York Times. After countless rounds of chemo, a clinical trial, and a bone marrow transplant she learned that a cure is not where the work of healing ends; it's where it begins. How could she reclaim what had been lost? Jaouad embarked on a 100-day, 15,000-mile road trip across the country. This is her inspiring exploration of what it means to begin again. -- adapted from jacket