Suleika Jaouad opens with her leukemia diagnosis at 22, an event that abruptly severed her sense of continuity between the person she'd been and the person illness required her to become.

What this fracture involved:

• Sudden immersion in a medical world with its own rules, hierarchy, and vocabulary
• Loss of the future she'd assumed — career plans, relationships, ordinary milestones — replaced by uncertain survival
• A profound sense that illness had made her a fundamentally different person, not simply a person with a new problem

This opening establishes the memoir's central preoccupation: not just surviving illness, but grappling with who you become in its aftermath.