The Book of Alchemy: A Creative Practice for an Inspired Life

Suleika Jaouad describes how journaling—something she has practiced for as long as she can remember—became a “lifeline” when she was diagnosed with leukemia at 22. Weeks of unsuccessful treatment and eventually an experimental clinical trial meant more than a year of hospital visits, isolation, and dangerous complications from the treatment and the illness. What helped with the despair was participating in the 100-day project first originated by Yale professor Michael Bierut, in which the participant engages in one creative exercise every single day for a 100 day-stretch. Jaouad journaled, and the writing helped her make sense of her experience; these entries eventually turned into material for her first writing job at the New York Times, where she penned the “Life, Interrupted” column about her experience as a young adult with cancer.

In the year after treatment, Jaouad stopped journaling for a while. She took on a new 100-day project “fifteen-thousand-mile solo cross-country road trip” (xvii). After she returned home to New York City, needing a change again, she sublet her apartment and moved to a log cabin in Vermont to write. Here, she started doing “morning pages,” a practice of writing three, long-hand, stream-of-consciousness pages first thing in the morning, as popularized by Julia Cameron. She also started seeking inspiration in journals and works by other writers like Sylvia Plath and Isabelle Eberhardt, even specific ones about living with illness like Virginia Woolf’s “On Being Ill,” Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals, and Frida Kahlo’s art journals. Suleika discovered how reading someone else’s writing or engaging with a different perspective served as reliable inspiration for her own writing.

After returning from Vermont, Jaouad made a number of life changes—she moved in with her then-boyfriend (now husband), Jon Batiste; went to graduate school; ran a marathon to celebrate her 30th birthday; and finally finished a manuscript of her memoir, Between Two Kingdoms. When the pandemic hit not long after, Jaouad started the “Isolation Journals”: “[A] daily journaling practice, done communally, with a short essay for inspiration and a prompt to get started” (xxi). She reached out to some of the “most remarkable people” she knows and asked them to contribute essays and prompts, and then started a newsletter in April 2020, inviting readers to journal daily for 100 days and share their entries if they so wished. By the end of the first month, the community had grown to 80,000 people.

The Book of Alchemy is a result of Jaouad’s pandemic project. She invites the reader to think of it as their own 100-day project, where they can read an essay each day and write to the accompanying prompt.