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Book · 2018
Sick: A Memoir
Porochista Khakpour recounts years of unexplained symptoms, misdiagnosis, addiction, and unstable care before a late-stage Lyme disease diagnosis, while examining illness through the parallel question of belonging.
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To throw one’s readers into such an intimate account of suffering is a daring choice, but it works, the reading experience mimicking the fevered desperation Khakpour describes. If it all becomes too much, the reader has the luxury of turning away from the page and taking a break. For Khakpour, however, there’s no such respite.
Lucy Scholes on The Financial Times Despite its intermittently chatty tone, Sick is a strange book, one that resists the clean narrative lines of many illness memoirs—in which order gives way to chaos, which is then resolved, with lessons learned and pain transcended along the way
Lidija Haas on The New Yorker The amazing thing about Khakpour’s book is the way she recognizes that any illness in modern life inevitably enters the mind. I hope Khakpour’s memoir isn’t relegated to the health section of the bookstore or of Amazon, because it’s not really about Lyme, or not most deeply about Lyme—it’s about modern life. And it’s one of the most chilling, if meandering, portraits of it I’ve read
Eve Fairbanks on Slate
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