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

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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A guide to the art of journaling—and a meditation on the central questions of life—by the bestselling author of Between Two Kingdoms, with contributions from Hanif Abdurraqib, Jon Batiste, Salman Rushdie, Gloria Steinem, George Saunders, and many more

“The Book of Alchemy proves on every page that a creative response can be found in every moment of life—regardless of what is happening in the world.”—Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat Pray Love

From the time she was young, Suleika Jaouad has kept a journal. She’s used it to mark life's biggest occasions and to weather its most ferocious storms. Journaling has buoyed her through illness, heartbreak, and the deepest uncertainty. And she is not alone: for so many people, keeping a journal is an essential tool for navigating both the personal peaks and valleys and the collective challenges of modern life. More than ever, we need a space for puzzling through.

In The Book of Alchemy, Suleika explores the art of journaling and shares everything she’s learned about how this life-altering practice can help us tap into that mystical trait that exists in every human: creativity. She has gathered wisdom from one hundred writers, artists, and thinkers in the form of essays and writing prompts. Their insights invite us to inhabit a more inspired life.

A companion through challenging times, The Book of Alchemy is broken into themes ranging from new beginnings to love, loss, and rebuilding. Whether you’re a lifelong journaler or new to the practice, this book gives you the tools, direction, and encouragement to engage with discomfort, ask questions, peel back the layers, dream daringly, uncover your truest self—and in doing so, to learn to hold the unbearably brutal and astonishingly beautiful facts of life in the same palm.

Also includes essays from: Martha Beck • Nadia Bolz-Weber • Alain de Botton • Susan Cheever • Lena Dunham • Melissa Febos • Liana Finck • John Green • Marie Howe • Pico Iyer • Oliver Jeffers • Quintin Jones • Michael Koryta • Hanif Kureishi • Kiese Laymon • Cleyvis Natera • Ann Patchett • Esther Perel • Adrienne Raphel • Jenny Rosenstrach • Sarah Ruhl • Sharon Salzberg • Dani Shapiro • Mavis Staples • Linda Sue Park • Nafissa Thompson-Spires • Jia Tolentino • Lindy West • Lidia Yuknavitch • And many others

Review

“The Book of Alchemy proves on every page that a creative response can be found in every moment of life—regardless of what is happening in the world. It also demonstrates that we can be more creative together than we could ever be alone. This book is not only beautiful but exceedingly helpful. I recommend it to every dreamer, with the highest respect and joy.”—Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat Pray Love

“An extraordinary collection of wisdom from some of the world’s greatest writers—and an inspiring set of prompts for your own writing. The Book of Alchemy is a springboard to new ideas, new insights, and new identities.”—Adam Grant,bestselling author of Think Again and host of the podcast Re:Thinking

“Brilliant. Gentle. Encouraging. If you want to make your life richer, follow her lead. Suleika Jaouad is showing us how to find wisdom in every transition, graduation, and U-turn. The perfect mix of incandescent wisdom and kick-in-the-pants motivation to start your own creative journey.”—Kate Bowler, author of Everything Happens for a Reason

“Beyond her brilliance as a writer, Suleika Jaouad’s greatest offering to the world is her brilliance of generosity, her curiosity, her seeking heart and mind. The Book of Alchemy is an extension and expansion of these gifts, carefully curated and thoughtfully presented, it doesn’t offer just one single answer, or one north star, but an entire galaxy. A path, with many paths springing forth from it, for anyone who wants to write, or chase an idea, or descend into their work with a newfound exuberance. This book is a gift.”—Hanif Abdurraqib, author of There’s Always This Year

“The prompts are varied enough to appeal to devoted diarists and newbies alike, and Jaouad poignantly interweaves her own intimate meditations on creativity, pain, and art. The result is a stellar guide that’s sure to spark the imagination.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review

About the Author

Suleika Jaouad is the author of the New York Times bestselling memoir Between Two Kingdoms, which has been translated into more than twenty languages. She wrote the Emmy Award-winning New York Times column and video series “Life, Interrupted,” and her essays and feature stories have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, The Guardian, and Vogue, among others. She is also the subject, along with husband Jon Batiste, of the Oscar-nominated documentary American Symphony—a portrait of two artists during a year of extreme highs and lows. A visual artist, her large-scale watercolors are the focus of several upcoming exhibitions. She is also the creator of the Isolation Journals, a weekly newsletter and global community that harnesses creativity as a tool to navigate life’s interruptions.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter 1

On Beginning

Not long ago, I was invited to a conference billed as a gathering of fifty of the world’s most innovative thinkers. Each day, there were lectures by everyone from leading scientists and tech CEOs to pioneering artists and actors and Arctic explorers. Afterward, we’d meet up in breakout sessions to discuss and debate the implications of their ideas. In these smaller groups, people would often start the conversation by identifying their field, then asking, “And what do you do?”

It’s that oh-so-human need to categorize, to sort by type, but as a writer, I’ve come to dread answering the question. I know the follow-up will be: “What kind of writing?” Much of my work has lived in the realm of memoir, which is often characterized (unfairly, I believe) as navel-gazing and lacking rigor, especially when the author is a young woman. In certain company, I sometimes feel tempted to beef it up, to make it sound more “serious.” Rather than saying, “I wrote a column about being a young adult with cancer,” I find myself wanting to say, “I used to write for the New York Times science section.”

So imagine my inner panic when, in the middle of this group of intellectuals, business scions, and Nobel-winning scientists, I was asked, “A writer, huh? So what is it you’re working on now?”

I was working on this book—this distillation of a practice that has saved my life. “A book about journaling,” I replied. I watched the answer fall flat, just as I’d feared. In that knee-jerk way, I felt I needed to justify it. To explain that, though journaling is sometimes dismissed as a childish pastime you do in a pretty diary with a tiny lock, its physical and mental benefits have been extolled in study after study—everything from reducing symptoms of depression and anxiety to improving working memory and strengthening the immune system. “It’s something everyone could benefit from,” I wanted to shout, “maybe especially you!”

I didn’t say that. Instead, I quickly changed the subject back to them and their pursuits. I have always thought of journaling as serious—it has had very serious applications in my life—but I’ve never been very good at the one-sentence pitch. If I could go back and explain why I feel called to share my particular approach to journaling, I would say this: I do this work because I know it works—and it’s necessary. The studies may be useful to sway the skeptics, but they’re just confirmation of what I already know on a soul level.

This is not just true in my own life. I have heard from more people than I can count testifying to how transformative this practice has been. A fifty-year-old woman who was stuck in a soul-sucking corporate job used these tools to realize her lifelong dream of becoming a writer: Her journal entries turned into prize-winning essays; she wrote a memoir, got an agent, and quit her day job. A mother reeling from the loss of her daughter began making art from these prompts, which allowed her to feel connected to her daughter and begin to process her grief. An oncologist who saw the health benefits of this approach to journaling has literally prescribed these prompts to over a hundred patients. I could fill pages and pages with stories like these.

Journaling as a process is utterly alchemizing, with practical applications in every area of one’s life and work. The journal is like a chrysalis: the container of your goopiest, most unformed self. It’s a rare space, in this age of hypercurated personas, where you can share your most unedited thoughts, where you can sort through the raw material of your life. Day by day, page by page, you uncover the answers that are already inside of you, and you begin to transform. And yet, at the same time that it offers transcendence, there’s nothing more humble than the journal. As long as there has been literacy, people have turned to it to catalog the everyday, which the word’s etymology makes clear. It comes from the Old French word jurnal, which has its roots in the Latin diurnalis, meaning “of a day.” If you trace the origin of the word diary, it’s the same. The oldest journals we know of were for recordkeeping, like the Diary of Merer, the ancient Egyptian papyrus logbook that recorded the transport of limestone to Giza, where it was used as cladding for pyramids.

Over the years, the form evolved from simple cataloging to include much more: everything from Marcus Aurelius’s private musings turned guide to life, Meditations; to the “pillow books” of the women of the Japanese court around A.D. 1000 (so named because they hid the diaries beneath their pillows), which detailed their public lives as well as fantasies and fictional tales; to the scientific notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci and Charles Darwin.

In the twentieth century, we get Anaïs Nin’s most intimate thoughts about her sexual and political awakenings and Virginia Woolf journaling about her reading and writing life. We get the diaries of individuals grappling with their private lives against the backdrop of repressive regimes, like Alice Dunbar-Nelson, who gives us an unadulterated look into the life of an early-twentieth-century woman of color in America, and Anne Frank, who famously documented her experience as a young Jewish girl in hiding under Nazi persecution.

Journals have become important historical artifacts, giving us glimpses into the past and providing insight into what our fellow humans lived through, be it illness or war or some other crisis, and how they managed to endure. As Anaïs Nin wrote, “When we go deeply into the personal, we go beyond the personal. We achieve something that is collective.”

The journal is capacious. It can be an aid to memory, a reliquary of major life events, a place to let off steam, rattle off lists of dos, don’ts, and dreams, or conjure something beautiful and wild and unexpected. It’s where we can go to cut through the noise, where we take stock and discover meaning, where we tap into the subconscious and our free-flowing stream of intuition. The journal is where we seek out and find our highest, most liberated, most creative self.

But whether you’re a longtime journaler or new to the practice, you’ve likely experienced that moment when you behold the blank page and are stricken with the question: How do I begin?

For me, it starts with the journal itself. Whether it’s a classic composition notebook from the drugstore or a leather-bound beauty, I always personalize it in some way. I adorn the cover or write myself a creative contract on the flyleaf or tuck a favorite old photograph into the opening pages—anything that amplifies its appeal and encourages me to return. I also keep handy a stock of my favorite pens.

The physical, tactile nature of journaling by hand is important to me. I love the interaction between paper and palm, how the pen glides across the page, how the letters emerge as images—swooping up, looping back, charging forward. “There is a state of mind which is not accessible by thinking,” writes Lynda Barry in her creative workbook and graphic memoir, What It Is. “It seems to require a participation with something, something physical we move, like a pen, like a pencil, something which is in motion—ordinary motion, like writing the alphabet.” Virginia Woolf also extols the joy of writing by hand; after spending many months revising a manuscript on her typewriter, she returned to pen and paper, and in her journal, she wrote: “How I should like . . . to write a sentence again! How delightful to feel it form and curve under my fingers.”

If you’re feeling resistant to the idea of writing by hand, what I’ll say is this: I myself find it useful, both because I like the unfurling of ink on the page and also because I’m less likely to self-edit that way. But we all have different needs, and you should feel free to journal in any way that makes sense for you—be it on a laptop, on your phone, or on a legal pad with a pencil stub.

Often, when I get to the page, several self-sabotaging thoughts rear their heads: “I have nothing to say” and “I don’t feel inspired to write one word, much less fill three pages” and “I’m never going to be able to do this consistently, so what’s the point?” I’ve concocted a number of tricks for pulling my mind out of those ruts, but one of my favorites was shared with me by the poet Marie Howe: “Whenever I can’t do the practice, I’ll get a composition book, and I’ll write three pages a day, but I write it with my nondominant hand, so it’s a big scrawl,” she said. “Or I’ll write, ‘I don’t want to write about . . .” and then just write into that—so there’s a release in it.”

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

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Visit the Random House Store

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

Product ID: U0593734637

Condition: New

The Book of Alchemy: A Creative Practice for an Inspired Life-0

Type: Hardcover

^AED147⁹⁷

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Availability: In Stock

Quantity:

Order today to get by 7-14 business days

Delivery fee of AED 20. Free for orders above AED 200.

Returns & Warranty policies

Imported From: United States

At BOLO, we work hard to ensure the products you receive are new, genuine, and sourced from reputable suppliers.

Every product in the BOLO catalogue is sourced through our Verified Global Supply Network of verified sellers, authorized distributors or directly from the manufacturer.

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