Sick – A Memoir
$16.00
Author: Porochista Khakpour
For as long as author Porochista Khakpour can remember, she has been sick. For most of that time, she didn’t know why. Several drug addictions, some major hospitalizations, and over $100,000 later, she finally had a diagnosis: late-stage Lyme disease.
Sick is Khakpour’s grueling, emotional journey – as a woman, an Iranian-American, a writer, and a lifelong sufferer of undiagnosed health problems – in which she examines her subsequent struggles with mental illness and her addiction to doctor prescribed benzodiazepines, that both aided and eroded her ever-deteriorating physical health.
Divided by settings, Khakpour guides the reader through her illness by way of the locations that changed her course – New York, LA, Santa Fe, and a college town in Germany – as she meditates on the physiological and psychological impacts of uncertainty, and the eventual challenge of accepting the diagnosis she had searched for over the course of her adult life.
A story of survival, pain, and transformation, Sick candidly examines the colossal impact of illness on one woman’s life by not just highlighting the failures of a broken medical system but by also boldly challenging our concept of illness narratives.
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Praise
“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 Hotel
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| Weight | 7.2 oz |
|---|---|
| Dimensions | 5.3 × .6 × 8 in |
