Sick: A Memoir – An Iranian-American Writer's Journey of Late-Stage Lyme Disease, Addiction, and Survival

A Best Book of the Year: Real Simple, Entropy, Mental Floss,Bitch Media, The Paris Reivew, and LitHub.Time Magazine's Best Memoirs of 2018• Boston Globe's 25 Books We Can't Wait to Read in 2018  •  Buzzfeed's33 Most Exciting New Books  • GQBest Non Fiction Book of 2018  • Bustle’s28 Most Anticipated Nonfiction Books of 2018 list  •  Nylon’s50 Books We Can’t Wait to Read in 2018  • Electric Literature’s 46 Books toRead By Women of Color in 2018 “PorochistaKhakpour’s powerful memoir, Sick, reads like a mystery and a reckoningwith a love song at its core. Humane, searching, and unapologetic, Sickis 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 inon her struggle toward health with an intelligence and intimacy that moved,informed, and astonished me.”   — CherylStrayed, New York Times bestselling author of WildA powerful, beautifully renderedmemoir of chronic illness, misdiagnosis, addiction, and the myth of fullrecovery.For as longas author Porochista Khakpour can remember, she has been sick. For most of thattime, she didn't know why. Several drug addictions, some majorhospitalizations, and over $100,000 later, she finally had a diagnosis:late-stage Lyme disease. Sick is Khakpour's grueling, emotional journey—as a woman, anIranian-American, a writer, and a lifelong sufferer of undiagnosed healthproblems—in which she examines her subsequent struggles with mental illness andher addiction to doctor prescribed benzodiazepines, that both aided and erodedher ever-deteriorating physical health. Divided by settings, Khakpour guidesthe reader through her illness by way of the locations that changed hercourse—New York, LA, Santa Fe, and a college town in Germany—as she meditateson the physiological and psychological impacts of uncertainty, and the eventualchallenge of accepting the diagnosis she had searched for over the course ofher adult life. A story of survival, pain, and transformation, Sick candidlyexamines the colossal impact of illness on one woman's life by not justhighlighting the failures of a broken medical system but by also boldlychallenging our concept of illness narratives. Read more