Sick : A Memoir

A Best Book of the Year:Real Simple, Entropy, Mental Floss, Bitch Media, The Paris Review, and LitHub.Time Magazine'sBest Memoirs of 2018Boston Globe's25 Books We Can't Wait to Read in 2018 Buzzfeed's 33Most Exciting New BooksGQBest Non Fiction Book of 2018Bustles28 Most Anticipated Nonfiction Books of 2018 list Nylons50 Books We Cant Wait to Read in 2018Electric Literatures46 Books to Read By Women of Color in 2018Porochista Khakpours powerful memoir,Sick, reads like a mystery and a reckoning with 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 in on her struggle toward health with an intelligence and intimacy that moved, informed, and astonished me.Cheryl Strayed,New York Timesbestselling author ofWildA powerful, beautifully rendered memoir of chronic illness, misdiagnosis, addiction, and the myth of full recovery.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.Sickis Khakpour's grueling, emotional journeyas a woman, an Iranian-American, a writer, and a lifelong sufferer of undiagnosed health problemsin 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 courseNew York, LA, Santa Fe, and a college town in Germanyas 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,Sickcandidly 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.