Porochista Khakpour

Porochista Khakpour’s powerful memoir, Sick, reads like a mystery and a reckoning with a love song at its core… Khakpour takes us all the way in on her struggle toward health with an intelligence and intimacy that moved, informed, and astonished me.

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…

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.

This is a story of towering frustrations written so beautifully that through the weird alchemy of art it ends up lifting the reader’s spirits… This is a gripping, moving, thoughtful meditation written at the highest levels of narrative engagement.

…I experience Porochista Khakpour’s Sick as an act of radical friendship because nobody should know this much about anybody else unless they love each other… Thrumming, diaristic, unabashedly wild and homeless-feeling, Sick is something gut-wrenching and new, a globally intimate book.

Porochista Khakpour threads together a startling tapestry of stories about a young woman seeking place — in the America she flees to as a refugee of Iran, in a medical system that offers her no answers, in the empty promises of pill bottles and… in the body.

Sick stages on the page what is at stake for a body under endless siege from addiction, illness, trauma, dislocation and dispossession. By sharing her body story, Porochista Khakpour gives the reader a profoundly generous gift: an unflinching narrative of the deep desire to live.

Readers, writers, and sick people all crave origin stories, and Khakpour tries to serve one up: the first bad decision, the first bad boyfriend, the first childhood trauma? A tick bite in California? Which came first, addiction or infection? Then she shows us the oceanic mess that is chronic illness… and how it becomes an ongoing presence.