Sick: A Memoir by Porochista Khakpour
Published by Harper Perennial on June 5, 2018
my rating: ★★.5
Goodreads avg: 3.41 (as of 2019-09-25)
Spoiler-free Review
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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.
It seems impossible to separate Khakpour’s life of illness from the remainder of her life. As she details, no one has been able to ascertain for certain when exactly she acquired Lyme. Some doctors have pointed to her health problems in childhood as symptoms, while others have indicated that college seemed like a likely bet. Having gone through one trauma after another, it’s also difficult to disentangle the symptoms of her Lyme from symptoms of primarily unrelated PTSD, depression, and anxiety. As she mentions, women typically struggle more with Lyme because they are often treated as psychiatric cases only and therefore left undiagnosed and untreated longer. As a quick note, there are extensive discussions of both drug abuse and suicide throughout the book, so if you find those triggering it may be best to steer clear.
And there it came: his half smile. And here it followed: my rage.
One thing that bothered me a lot was that she’s somewhat judgmental of one of her friends in Chicago, a wealthy woman who eventually reveals she’s a prostitute. This judgment comes unchallenged by the present Khakpour looking back and it’s clear she was sickened by the thought of her friend making money in this way, and pities her even though she herself is weak and slowly disintegrating while her friend is happy and stable. It was strange reading about someone who can look down so strongly on others when they themselves are struggling even more.
I also kept saying something I had heard some other therapist or doctor say at some point, maybe in the psych ward: Let’s get to the bottom of this once and for all. I was mesmerized by what “the bottom of this” could be, but I knew I wanted it.
Occasionally, the timeline feels mixed up. She’ll jump ahead only to jump immediately back and I forget where we are in the story. There are bits repeated throughout — stories she tells multiple times, to my confusion — that give the whole thing a sense of deja vu. Its meandering nature felt sometimes without purpose and I found myself checking where I was in the book to see if it was close to over. Her story itself is exhausting to read, and god knows how much more exhausting it must have been to live through, but its monotony made it disengaging when combined with the matter-of-fact tone she communicates her experiences in. Having had (much less serious) chronic illnesses of my own, I understand how hopeless the seemingly endless chain of doctors who don’t know what’s wrong with you is, but the negativity also felt like it would drown me without adding much to my experience as a reader.
So many men had tried to fix me; so many men were convinced they could help. What was one more.
Overall, in spite of my criticisms, I think this book is worth reading if you’re interested even if it didn’t quite work for me.
Sarah Ames-Foley 
I’ve read a few mixed reviews of this one and although I was curious about it I see from yours that it’s not going to be for me. It sounds confusing and the judgement of her friend, even without any examination in retrospect, is odd. Thanks for such a detailed review!
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No problem! Hannah read it and had similar issues, so I wish I had read her review a little more closely before committing.
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Great review! I think this was not really on my radar, but then I read the synopsis and it sounded so important and like it could be a great read. But the issues you had with the book sound like the kind of stuff that puts me off a book as well, so maybe I’ll see what other people say and not add it on my TBR for now. 🙂
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There are definitely a lot of important issues covered — it’s incredible how dismissive people are of her illness. I believe Hannah’s review covered similar ground and talked about it a bit more extensively, so I’d recommend reading that if you haven’t yet! It’s a shame I didn’t like it, because I think the issues in her writing were really due to her inability to focus while ill. I just wish the editors had taken a stronger hand to it.
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I’ve been writing my own memoir and one of the things I’ve discovered that everyone has good and bad in them. In fact, that’s what makes me keep reading them. It makes my own journey seem less insignificant. Thanks for sharing. I’ll have to read this.
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