Lucette Lagnado, a journalist and author whose memoirs chronicled her Jewish family’s longing for an exodus-in-reverse after an agonizing departure from Egypt to America in the early 1960s, died on July 10 in Manhattan. She was 62.

Douglas Feiden, her husband and a fellow reporter, said the cause was complications of treatments for childhood cancer. She died in a hospital.

Ms. Lagnado (pronounced lahn-YAH-doh) was at her death a senior special writer for The Wall Street Journal, where her eye-opening accounts of shortcomings in the American health care system had been inspired by her family’s medical challenges.

An author of three nonfiction books, she won the $100,000 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature in 2008 for her evocative memoir “The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit.”