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A devastating memoir of chronic illness, misdiagnosis, addiction and the myth of full recovery – already an online phenomenon in the USA in summer 2018
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For as long as Porochista Khakpour can remember, she has been sick. For most of that time, she didn’t know why. A story of survival, pain and transformation, Sick examines the colossal impact of illness on one woman’s life. It is a journey that took Porochista Khakpour from Tehran, the town of her birth, through the major cities of America, the country she came to call home, before she eventually found a diagnosis of late-stage Lyme disease.
Sick explores what it means to feel at home in one’s body, and also one’s country. And what it means not to.
“In Sick, Khakpour, a novelist and academic, chronicles her journey. It is a story of extreme illness and her fight for a diagnosis; of drugs, prescribed and recreational; of being female and a woman of colour; of feeling like an outsider. It amounts to a fierce work of feminism and an indictment of the healthcare system in America. It is also a haunting and sensational achievement … Sick is an intelligent tale of remarkable survival — as soon as you have finished you will want to start again”
sunday Times
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“Reads like a mystery and a reckoning with a love song at its core … Khakpour takes us all the way in on her struggle towards health with an intelligence and intimacy that moved, informed, and astonished me”
Cheryl Strayed
“Draws attention to the ways in which women are expected to tell stories of sickness”
the New Yorker
“A gripping account of illness … This intimate account of suffering has the narrative propulsion of a thriller”
financial Times
“Arresting … Sick upends all the tropes of the illness memoir … Khakpour’s prose is beautiful, at once silky and scorching, like the curls of smoke rising from a fire that’s just starting”
slate
Porochista Khakpour
Porochista Khakpour is the author of the novels Sons and Other Flammable Objects, which was longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize, and The Last Illusion. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Elle, Slate and Salon, among others. She has been awarded a number of fellowships and is currently a guest member of the faculty at Vermont College of Fine Arts and a Contributing Editor at the Evergreen Review. Born in Tehran and raised in Los Angeles, she now lives in New York City’s Harlem. Her memoir, Sick, chronicles her discovery of late-stage Lyme disease.
@PKhakpour | porochistakhakpour.com
‘We have a really shamefully horrid healthcare system, and I think that’s part of it. It’s much more convenient to think these people are just crazy, or it’s in their heads. It’s a very real thing; I don’t know of anyone who doubts it any more. Occasionally I encounter people that do. I’m astounded at their wilful ignorance; it’s not actual ignorance.’ Porochista Khakpour discusses living with chronic illness and her new book Sick with The Observer.
Alex Clark
The Observer