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's
33 Most Exciting New Books • GQ
Best Non Fiction Book of 2018 • Bustle’s
28 Most Anticipated Nonfiction Books of 2018 list • Nylon’s
50 Books We Can’t Wait to Read in 2018 • Electric Literature’s 46 Books to
Read By Women of Color in 2018

“Porochista
Khakpour’s powerful memoir, Sick, reads like a mystery and a reckoning
with a love song at its core. Humane, searching, and unapologetic, Sick
is 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 Times bestselling author of Wild

A 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.

Sick is Khakpour's grueling, emotional journey—as a woman, an
Iranian-American, a writer, and a lifelong sufferer of undiagnosed health
problems—in 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
course—New York, LA, Santa Fe, and a college town in Germany—as 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, Sick candidly
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.

Book Talk

Join the conversation