March 15, 2018
A distinguished Iranian-born writer and creative writing professor's memoir of her struggle with trauma, drug addiction, mental illness, and late-stage Lyme disease.Physical and mental pain had always defined Khakpour's (The Last Illusion, 2014, etc.) life. A child of the Iranian Revolution, her earliest memories were of "pure anxiety." She survived the trauma of living in a war zone and moved from Tehran to Los Angeles. As she grew into adolescence, she writes, "everything about my body felt wrong," and her feelings of dysmorphia remained one of the constants in an often chaotic life. In college, Khakpour, who had long been fascinated by the "altered states" that drugs could produce, began a "casual [long-term] relationship" with cocaine and cultivated the "heroin chic" look fashionable during the 1990s. In addition to her experimentation with drugs, the author endured harrowing experiences with sexual assault and depression. Khakpour's post-collegiate life brought with it a series of difficult, sometimes-abusive relationships, graduate school at Johns Hopkins, psychotropic drugs to control anxiety, insomnia, and mood disorders, severe health problems initially diagnosed as autoimmune disorders, and "a seesaw of struggling to survive in New York and then running home to LA and then escaping back to New York." Her life stabilized for a short time after she accepted a temporary position at Bucknell University. When her health began to fail again, she sought treatment in the New Age "healing vortex" of Santa Fe; but soon after she left, she once again became a prescription pill "drug addict." It was not until she returned temporarily to California that a doctor officially diagnosed her with a case of late-stage Lyme disease, which would mean permanent recurrences of the breakdowns she had fought to overcome. Lucid, eloquent, and unflinchingly honest, Khakpour's book is not just about a woman's relationship to illness, but also a remarkably trenchant reflection on personal and human frailty.A courageously intimate memoir about living within a body that has "never felt at ease."

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March 26, 2018
Khakpour (The Last Illusion) incisively tells of living with a mystery illness that is eventually diagnosed as late-stage Lyme disease. From the time she was about five, she recalls feeling something was always “off” inside her body. From insomnia to hand tremors, her unusual symptoms were at first attributed to PTSD (Khakpour was born in Tehran in 1978; her family fled the country during revolution and settled in L.A.). Her parents believed her health would improve as she got older, but as an adult, her physical and psychiatric symptoms increased in severity and occurrence. Fainting, hallucinations, and dangerously high fevers limited her activity. With no definitive answer from the medical community, she developed an addiction to benzodiazepines for relief. Her boyfriends and colleagues function as caretakers as she moves from one healer to another (settling in rural Pennsylvania with a boyfriend, she delights that “we built a real domestic life for ourselves for the first time”). Khakpour writes honestly about her psychological struggle (“I felt spent most of my days feeling dead inside”) enduring a disease for which she’s treated, but for which there’s no cure. Her remarkable story is one of perseverance, survival, and hope.

May 1, 2018

Novelist Khakpour (The Last Illusion) recalls escaping revolution and war in Iran with her parents in the 1980s and relocating to the suburbs of Los Angeles. Storytelling helped her survive a childhood in which she experienced fainting and tremors, symptoms that stayed with her through adulthood. Khakpour is painfully honest about her drug use and lingering cocaine addiction, wondering if that impacted her mysterious illness, later confirmed to be Lyme disease. The author shines when recounting the years of dealing with skeptical doctors, often while lacking health insurance, and how depression and insomnia affected her personal and professional life. She conveys the transient life of an academic, from Pennsylvania to New Mexico to Germany, often the lone Iranian on campus or in town. The narrative can be exasperating, as she pursues partners who are also willing to assume a caretaker role. Still, Khakpour writes cogently about modern health issues: dating while chronically ill, using GoFundMe to crowdsource payment for medical bills, and navigating alternative medicine and mysticism. VERDICT A sometimes challenging memoir of feeling out of place, both inside and outside of one's own body; yet Khakpour brings a fresh perspective on how women live and cope with mental and chronic illness.--Stephanie Sendaula, Library Journal

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

May 1, 2018
From the time her family traveled to California to escape the wars in Iran, Khakpour claimed to not feel at home in her body. PTSD may have started her problems, but an undiagnosed case of Lyme disease haunted her. Her memoir, organized by the cities she's lived in, records her growing number of symptoms, ranging from headaches to insomnia, dizziness, pain, and suicidal thoughts. Her writing becomes secondary as she wanders from hospital to guru, searching for answers and trying everything from yoga, acupuncture, and mystics to medicines, psychiatrists, and emergency rooms. After thousands of dollars and a lifetime of seeking, Khakpour is finally diagnosed with Lyme disease and treated. She can't be fully healed, but she finally has an explanation of all her vague if painful symptoms and a course of action. She speaks frankly of her life and such issues as prescription medicine addiction and depression. Lyme disease is difficult to diagnose, and Khakpour's frank memoir will give hope to others who are struggling with this devastating illness.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)

"Porochista Khakpour's powerful memoir, Sick, reads like a mystery and a reckoning with a love song at its core. Humane, searching, and unapologetic, Sick is about the thin lines and vast distances between illness and wellness, healing and suffering, the body and the self. Khakpour takes us all the way in on her struggle toward health with an intelligence and intimacy that moved, informed, and astonished me." — Cheryl Strayed, New York Times bestselling author of Wild

"Sickness, in the world and in the body, is an attempt to flatten the individual, to make it conform to an inflexible name. Porochista Khakpour resists this on every page. Her writing is first of all vibrant, humming, strong, tall, striding. It powers through paper frailties. Survival, she reminds us at the end of Sick, can be an act of the imagination: it is the courage to insist on seeing yourself decades in the future, climbing a mountain, squinting into the sun, sitting down at the desk to write what happened." — Patricia Lockwood, author of Priestdaddy, named one of the 10 best books of 2017 by the New York Times

"Porochista Khakpour's Sick is a bruising reminder and subtle revelation that the lines between a sick human being and a sick nation are often not lines at all. The book boldly asserts that a nation wholly disinterested in what really constitutes 'health' will never tend the bodily and emotional needs of its sick and vulnerable. Somehow, Khakpour manages to craft the minutiae of the moments spent keeping herself alive while obliterating what could have easily been written as spectacular melodrama. I'm most amazed at how time itself, and point of view, are 'sick' and 'sickening' in this wonderful memoir. Khakpour has done more than something I've never seen before in this phenomenal book; she's done something I never imagined possible." — Kiese Laymon author of Heavy

"I'm so excited for the world (you!) to read Porochista Khakpour's Sick because now you'll understand. Understand what it's like to navigate a broken medical system; understand what chronic illness does to the self; understand the damage that doubt and ignorance can wreck; understand how living and self-destructing, writing and working, loving and sex doesn't just stop when you're ill. And for those of you who understand this all too well, this book gives a voice—a fierce, booming, brutally honest voice—to the millions of people silently suffering with invisible illnesses of their own. 'I always felt broken in my body,' she writes, and I shudder with recognition. Thank you, thank you, thank you, Porochista for giving so much of yourself in this miraculous memoir. The world is a better place with your book in it." — Susannah Cahalan, #1 New York Times Bestselling author of Brain on Fire

"Thank you, Porochista Khakpour, for writing an unflinchingly honest, complicated memoir about living life with Lyme. Sick should be required reading at every medical school!" — Kathleen Hanna

"Sick is a riveting plunge into the most profound mysteries of mind and body—the haunted labyrinths of addiction; a chronic illness that mightily resists answers; and, ultimately, a diagnosis that proves just as confounding: late-stage Lyme disease. As Porochista Khakpour works to uncover the roots of the maladies upending her physical and mental health, she raises vital questions that challenge the common perceptions around illness and treatment and recovery. Miraculously, Sick emerges as a force of life." — Laura van den Berg, author of The Third...