Photography by Megan Mumford

Suleika Jaouad has a pile of dogs in her lap. The writer is sitting in the Brooklyn brownstone she shares with her husband, musician Jon Batiste, in early April, getting her hair done in preparation for our photo shoot while absentmindedly petting whichever head is on top at the given moment. There’s Lentil, the totally hairless, mostly toothless Xoloitzcuintli senior rescue pup that has more Instagram followers (and maybe more outfits) than some minor celebrities. And then there’s Mouse and Nonna Ramona, two senior foster Chihuahuas Jaouad and Batiste picked up from a Los Angeles rescue when they were in town for the Oscars in March. Sunshine and River, the couple’s other dogs, occupy themselves in the other room with a game of tug-of-war. “I was scared to tell my mom I brought home two more dogs,” Jaouad says. “I said, ‘I feel like I’m 8 years old again smuggling a stray into my bedroom, about to get in trouble.’” 

Jaouad’s connection to dogs—and the three “Baby Grandmas” in her lap in particular—is nothing new. As a fourth grader in Saratoga Springs, she convinced a classmate’s father to give her an “internship” at his vet clinic, Upstate Animal Medical Center on Maple Avenue, where she’d observe surgeries and clean kennels. On the weekends, she’d walk dogs at Adirondack Save-A-Stray in Corinth.

“I’m very much a mutt,” she says. “I have three passports. I’ve always been drawn to underdogs, maybe because I felt like one as a kid.”

If Jaouad was an underdog, she’s lived out the against-all-odds trope many times over throughout her 37 years of life. Now, she’s the Emmy Award–winning journalist behind a widely read New York Timescolumn and video series. She’s the author of two best-selling books. She’s the subject, alongside her husband, of an Oscar-nominated Netflix documentary. And she publishes Substack’s top literature newsletter, which boasts 260,000 readers in all 50 states and 214 countries. Not to mention the fact that through it all, she’s battled cancer not once, not twice, but three times.

Jaouad’s is a story of self-discovery in the face of hardship, bravery in the form of allowing yourself to feel vulnerable, and unapologetic creativity in a world that loves to put people in boxes. And it starts in Saratoga.

Born in New York City, Jaouad spent her early years in Tunisia, where her father, retired professor Hédi Jaouad, is from; Switzerland, where her mother, artist Anne Francey, is from; and Saratoga Springs, where her family ultimately settled after her father got a job teaching French at Skidmore College. Going into Kindergarten at Lake Avenue Elementary School, Jaouad didn’t speak a word of English.

“I started keeping a journal in elementary school as a way for me to be in conversation with myself and figure out not just who I wanted to be and who I could be, but also to make sense of the world around me,” she says. “I always felt like a misfit kid, especially with two parents from two very different cultures. I had a place in the back of my journal where I would keep track of little English idioms, slang words, and colloquialisms that I could then practice and try to weave into conversation.” One entry she recently came across in an old journal? “Talk to the hand.”

Aside from stints in Tunisia when she was in third grade and Switzerland when she was in sixth grade, Jaouad spent the majority of her childhood in Saratoga, where she remembers having breakfast at friends’ houses before taking the bus to school, and going to the Saratoga Springs Public Library, where both she and her brother had their favorite arm chairs. As she got older, she worked jobs at both Caffè Lena (where she could listen in on whatever performance was going on that night) and as a gallery monitor for the Tang Teaching Museum (which she still considers her favorite job ever).

“Being in a town that celebrates the arts with such a feeling of community—where I would walk into the public library and know all of the librarians by name and they’d recommend books to me—that was huge for me,” she says. “I was so lucky to have what felt like a small-town childhood experience with access to world-class creative, musical, and artistic experiences.” 

One such artistic experience was the New York State Summer School of the Arts’ School of Orchestral Studies at Skidmore, which Jaouad attended in the summer of 2004. It was there that a bass solo she performed at the program’s end-of-summer concert at Saratoga Performing Arts Center got her noticed. She wound up playing for prominent classical bassist Homer Mesch, who secured her a spot in Juilliard’s pre-college program the following fall.

Jaouad attended the pre-college program during her junior year and what would have been her senior year; her parents allowed her to leave high school to focus on music, provided she took some classes at Skidmore simultaneously. Over the course of the next two years, she discovered that a career as a classical bassist actually wasn’t what she was looking for. She pivoted, and in 2010 graduated summa cum laude from Princeton University with a Bachelor of Arts in Near Eastern Studies and a double minor in Women & Gender Studies and French, with the goal of becoming a foreign correspondent.

The following year, she was diagnosed with a rare and aggressive form of acute myeloid leukemia.

Jaouad documented her harrowing three-and-a-half-year battle with cancer on a blog titled “Life, Interrupted,” which eventually was picked up by The New York Timesand made into a regular column, and later in her memoir, Between Two Kingdoms. When she was declared cancer-free at the age of 26, she learned to drive and set out on a 15,000-mile, 100-day solo road trip across the US to visit the people she’d connected with from her hospital bed by way of her Timescolumn.

In the spring of 2020, Jaouad, no stranger to isolation, given the extended hospital stays of her early twenties, found herself in COVID-19 quarantine at her parents’ house in Saratoga. She again returned to her journal and again had the idea to share what she was writing and experiencing with others. On April 1, she launched The Isolation Journals newsletter, sending out regular essays by writers, artists, and thinkers she admired paired with creative prompts. Within 24 hours she had 40,000 readers, and by the end of that first month, she had built a community 80,000 strong.

The Isolation Journals continued through the pandemic, and through Jaouad’s second cancer diagnosis in 2021. Yes, the leukemia returned. While she was in the hospital receiving chemotherapy, Batiste was at the top of his career, writing a symphony that would be performed at Carnegie Hall and earning 11 Grammy nominations. The juxtaposition—which Jaouad described at the time as “a life of contrasts”—was documented in American Symphony, a Grammy-winning Netflix film that follows Batiste and Jaouad during that time.

And in 2024, Jaouad’s cancer came back. Again. It is now considered incurable; she will be in treatment for the rest of her life. 

“The advice that’s often given is to live every day as if it’s your last,” she says. “I understand that in principle—in theory—and ultimately found it to be unsustainable. For me, it was too much pressure to have every family dinner be meaningful, to have every day count for something. It introduced this sense of urgency that ultimately felt spiritually and existentially exhausting.” So, she switched to the gentler mindset of living every day as if it’s her first. “Instead of waking up and asking myself what will make today as successful or meaningful as possible?, it’s a much smaller question,” she says. “What am I curious about? What sounds fun? What feels even just a little bit enlivening?”

Through it all, journaling has remained a constant in Jaouad’s life, and in 2025, she published a book that puts into print what The Isolation Journals had been doing for the last five years. Made up of 100 short essays from 100 different contributors including author John Green, an Olympic speedskater, a prisoner, and even Jon Batiste, plus 10 longer autobiographical essays by Jaouad herself, The Book of Alchemy: A Creative Practice for an Inspired Life is a meditation on the art of journaling and its benefits, which for Jaouad range from thought organization to kickstarting the creative process.

“I’m someone who, the second I open a Word doc to write, I feel intense fear and anxiety and insecurity,” she says. “It’s the tyranny of the blinking cursor and this immense sense of pressure to not just write, but to write well—to write something that will be well received. Because of that, I often write the first drafts of everything in my journal. I have to trick my brain back to that space of this is the writing that doesn’t count.” The result? Something outrageous, messy, or nonsensical…which often yields the actual idea that winds up in the Word document. 

After being on the road promoting The Book of Alchemy, Jaouad is looking forward to what comes next. She has plans to start writing fiction. She’s working on a collection of paintings and essays. She’s designing a home goods collection. “For a lot of kids, there’s this pressure to find your singular passion, to turn that passion into a profession, and to stay in your lane,” she says. “I’m giving myself permission to braid all the different mediums and the different forms of creative expression that I’ve always loved, that I’ve always done, but that I didn’t feel like I could actually focus on.”

That, it turns out, is something she learned how to do in Saratoga.

“Because I grew up in this town where there was this swirl of different creative energies, my inspiration comes to me from all kinds of places,” she says. “It comes to me from film; it comes to me from going to the museum. Growing up, I would go every week to the Saratoga Film Forum. It was always incredible films, and a lot of foreign films. And so I think because I grew up in this town where there was so much creative cross-pollination, I’m someone who very actively tries to cultivate that for myself.”

Ultimately, the next chapter in Jaouad’s story, however uncertain, will be one in which she channels the wise
words of jazz pianist Thelonious Monk: “A genius is the one most like himself.”

“I’m really excited to enter into my favorite season of creative work,” she says. “The one in which I get to dream of a new book and read and collect inspiration and get really quiet and take my brain for a walk and see where it leads me.” And maybe—no, definitely—pet a few dogs while she’s at it.  

Suleika Jaouad’s Favorite Saratoga Spots

Saratoga Springs Public Library, which her parents referred to as their babysitter

Caffè Lena, where she worked as a teenager

Uncommon Grounds, where she first got into writing

Lyrical Ballad, where she had her first kiss

Skidmore College, where her dad worked as a French professor

The Tang, where she worked her favorite job ever

Saratoga Arts, which hosted the Saratoga Film Forum every week (P.S. It was revived this past April!)