-
Access Our
Best Book Club
Books of 2025!
Summary | Excerpt | Reviews | Beyond the book | Read-Alikes | Genres & Themes | Author Bio
A Memoir
by Porochista Khakpour
Book Reviewed by: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.
Paperback Original
Khakpour's story is a powerful one of being mired in sickness and not getting the necessary help from medical professionals. Doctors insisted her problems were psychological; one even recommended that she check into a psych ward. It's also clear just how time-consuming and expensive being a chronic patient can be. There is, unfortunately, some inherent repetition in a book of this nature. At times it feels like an endless cycle of doctors, appointments, and treatment strategies ranging from a paleo diet and alternative medicines to benzodiazepines, drugs used to treat anxiety. The details of her many jobs and relationships can blend into one. However, the overall arc of struggling with one's body and coming to terms with limitations will resonate widely...continued
Full Review
(803 words)
This review is available to non-members for a limited time. For full access,
become a member today.
(Reviewed by Rebecca Foster).
Porochista Khakpour's Sick is a memoir of living with chronic Lyme disease. Lyme disease is caused by a bacterial infection, specifically a bite from a tick bearing the Borrelia burgdorferi bacterium. B. burgdorferi is one of just a few spirochetes, or 'spiral-shaped' bacteria, to be identified to date. (The pathogen that causes syphilis is another.) In the USA, the hot spots are the Northeast (from Maine to Virginia), the West coast, and Wisconsin and Minnesota. In these areas, hiking, gardening, and walking a dog through tall grass are considered particularly risky activities. Lyme disease also occurs in Europe and Asia.
Tick bites often result in a noticeable bull's-eye rash, but not always. The rash is not necessarily ...
This "beyond the book" feature is available to non-members for a limited time. Join today for full access.
If you liked Sick, try these:
by Jon McGregor
Published 2022
A thrilling and propulsive novel of an Antarctica expedition gone wrong and its far-reaching consequences for the explorers and their families "leaves the reader moved and subtly changed, as if she had become part of the story" (Hilary Mantel).
by Marty Makary
Published 2021
One in five Americans now has medical debt in collections and rising health care costs today threaten every small business in America. Dr. Makary, one of the nation's leading health care experts, travels across America and details why health care has become a bubble.
Cheryl Strayed, New York Times bestselling author of Wild
Porochista Khakpour's powerful memoir, Sick, reads like a mystery and a reckoning with a love song at its core.
.gif)