Suleika Jaouad on the journal: It's a repository of memory, a place to catch moments as if in amber
On the instant New York Times bestseller, The Book of Alchemy + a giveaway 📖
Last weekend I had the singular experience of seeing one of my favorite authors,
, in conversation with one of my favorite musicians, Jon Batiste. Jon hosted The Alchemy Tour, the collaborative performance doubling as a book tour for Suleika’s instant New York Times bestseller, The Book of Alchemy.The two — who happen to be married — sat on a couch, sometimes holding hands, sometimes not, always looking at one another as they spoke. It was as if we, the audience, were guests at their home and privy to their private conversation about the humiliation of Suleika’s first short story, or what it felt like to hear her leukemia returned after years in remission.
While Suleika read an excerpt from her book, Jon accompanied her on the piano, his astonishing talent rivaled only by her ability to use creativity as an act of survival.
When Jon read from the book — he contributed an essay and a journaling prompt titled The Glorious Awkwardness, in which he recounts running into Jay-Z and Beyoncé and making the most endearing fool out of himself — Suleika could be seen on the mustard yellow couch laughing at her husband’s awkwardness, which she vouched for.
What Jay-Z and Beyoncé are to so many, Jon and Suleika are to me. They’re the power couple I’d most like to meet; the kind of people who humbly discuss meeting each other as awkward young teens at band camp.
Suleika spoke of the time she and Jon reconnected, years after they first met. He had run into a mutual friend, who alerted Jon to Suleika’s hospitalization for leukemia. He gathered his band and that very day, they visited Suleika’s hospital room and played for her.
In her journal, Suleika wrote something along the lines of: “The saints came marching in, and they also played the song.”
Cue Jon grabbing his melodica off of the coffee table, on which he played Oh When The Saints Go Marching In.
Later, while Jon was entrancing the audience on the piano, Suleika fetched her upright bass. She hadn’t played it in years, but she dusted it off for this tour. Together, they played a beautiful tribute to the contributors to The Book of Alchemy, while recorded voices of essayists rang out in the Pantages Theater.
It quite literally, as the young folks say, altered my brain chemistry. I could have sat in that stately theater listening to the two of them for hours, feeling their love and the buoyancy of the entire audience. Together, we all sang and shone our cell phone flashlights, Jon and Suleika being consummate engagers of their communities.
Minneapolis was their last stop of the tour. The way Suleika clutched her heart when the show was over, the way pride transfigured Jon’s face into an outward expression of love of all kinds: romantic love, parental love, sibling love, paternal love — I saw it all. I felt it all.
We collected our copies of The Book of Alchemy on our way out. The first thing I did was look under the book cover to see the place I would write my name, marking it my book — a thoughtful touch Suleika had worked into her hardcovers. Then, prompted by my knowing husband, this photo of me cradling the book like a precious baby:
The book and The Alchemy Tour could not have come at a more appropriate time for me. I am in a place with my creative practice that requires some thought and reflection. I’m in the place Suleika says she journals for: to “traverse the liminal space between non longer and not yet.”
The Book of Alchemy
Suleika finds that reading someone else’s words before she journals stirs something new in her, so she collected essays and prompts from 100 people to inspire readers to get journaling. The contributors consist of authors, artists, inmates, and educators; nurses, musicians, CEOs, and entrepreneurs. Some of the essays were written by people I’d never heard of before, but there is one is by Gloria Steinem. There’s one by Melissa Febos. One by a six-year-old brain cancer survivor.
The essays and prompts are divided into sections like On Love, On Ego, On The Body. Each section is introduced by an illustrative essay by Suleika, who writes with heart unlike any other author I know. She explains that her modus operandi is “to trust and find ways to delight in the mystery of how things unfold, even if it’s not what you had planned, even if it’s far from ideal, and to believe that facing the thing you fear brings you exactly what you need.”
That’s what this book is for: to help readers delight in their ordinary or extraordinary lives. To get people to journal, a practice she attributes to surviving her first bone marrow transplant.
The essays throughout are personal. One talks about how, after her child died, she created little gestures from the soul to survive, temporary art projects only for her, only for her son. Her prompt: to make a piece of impermanent art.
In another essay, an author writes of the time she realized she had work engagements daily for the next three months. What followed was the creation of a sunset log. Her prompt: Go outside for fifteen minutes and pay attention to your surroundings.
The prompts are for journaling, yes, but some nudge us to draw, to create something other than a journal entry. A mind map, for example. A poem by erasure.
You can read the book in bits and pieces or you can read it whole, as I did. The day after the tour was the first truly warm spring day we’ve had here in Minneapolis. Both of my children napped that afternoon, which seldom happens, and I got to sit in the sun and read the book for hours. I was halfway through by the time they woke up. A prompt a day or 50 in one — any way you read the book works.
Having read it in a couple of sittings, I am now going back each morning and reading one essay and prompt before journaling — a practice I have done on and off my whole life. When I opened my journal to do the first prompt, I landed on an entry I’d written about the night we brought my son home from the hospital. My daughter, almost three, stayed in our bed that night and when the baby cried, her face rippled with sadness for him. I read that our first afternoon as a family of four, she brought him markers to so he could color with her. I didn’t remember either of these things, but now I will in perpetuity. I only have to look at my journal.
“What usually makes it into our memory banks,” Suleika says, “are the bigger things — the zeniths or the nadirs — so it’s a kind of luxury to recall those sweet small moments, the ones that fade from view with the passage of time.”
As I read in The Book of Alchemy about those sweet small moments, and reread some from my own journal, I thought about Joan Didion’s essay on keeping a personal notebook. Sure enough, Suleika mentions the essay, quoting the very same sentences I fixated on when writing about Didion last year, about keeping on nodding terms with the people we used to be. Suleika has reminded me how transformative it can be to preserve those snapshots of the people I once was.
“As humans, we are meaning-making machines and relentless seekers of patterns, rhythms, and rhymes,” Suleika says. This book has 100 ways for readers to make meaning out of our lives.
Have you been waiting for the giveaway part? Here it is. Each attendee to The Alchemy Tour received a copy of Suleika’s book. Since I went with my husband, we took home two copies, but we only need one.
I am going to mail a signed copy of The Book of Alchemy by Suleika Jaouad to one of my readers.
How to enter:
Make sure you are subscribed to The Underlined.
In the comments below, tell me about your own journaling practice. Don’t have one? I want to hear about that, too. If you’re struggling, I’ll flip through the book and find a prompt for you.
Comment by next Wednesday, May 14 at 12:00 pm CT. I will randomly select a winner and will announce the winner in next week’s post (+ will reach out privately).
U.S. and Canada only.
I cannot wait to share this book with one of you.
What are you reading? What are you underlining?
What I’m reading: Greta & Valdin by Rebecca K Reilly and Anita de Monte Laughs Last by Xochitl Gonzalez
What I’m underlining: [From The Book of Alchemy by Suleika Jaouad]: “This is one of my favorite things about the journal. It’s a repository of memory, a place to catch moments as if in amber.”
If you enjoyed this essay, please share it with someone who could use it. Someone struggling with their own creative process, someone who journals, someone who’s feeling stuck.
Love, Kolina
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Fantastic post and share! I’m excited to get this book now. I’ve been a lover of all things paper and pens for my entire 65 years. I journal in multiple notebooks at a time. I record tidbits from my day and ponder life’s challenges and rewards. I carry my journal from room to room. I like to capture quotes and be inspired by books or other readings. I am loving your space here. Thank you.
As always, your writing arrows right to the heart of things. I felt I was there with you as you wrote about attending the Alchemy tour, which I would have loved to have done. I look forward to each of your entries here, and read them with pleasure. This one was so full of love and joy. A wonderful reminder, not just to journal, but to reread our journals to see our other selves. Once again, thank you!