Read Full Review >ĭespite its intermittently chatty tone, Sick is a strange book, one that resists the clean narrative lines of many illness memoirs-in which order gives way to chaos, which is then resolved, with lessons learned and pain transcended along the way. It’s something to keep by our desks rather than our bedside tables: not a consolation but a provocation. She’s profound, even prophetic, in the in-between passages where she’s muddling along, not quite broken but not quite whole, either. Khakpour’s prose is beautiful, at once silky and scorching, like the curls of smoke rising from a fire that’s just starting. And she unmasks the terrifying revelation that any person’s efforts to heal herself, bodily or psychically, have just as good a chance to be wounding as they do to be nourishing. Her tale reveals with unsettling clarity that the damage wrought by each of the disappointments is as cumulatively poisoning as any tick bite she might have gotten. like reading the diary of someone you always wanted to be like, only to be transfixed by just how bad being that person can be. And it’s one of the most chilling, if meandering, portraits of it I’ve read. I hope Khakpour’s memoir isn’t relegated to the health section of the bookstore or of Amazon, because it’s not really about Lyme, or not most deeply about Lyme-it’s about modern life. The amazing thing about Khakpour’s book is the way she recognizes that any illness in modern life inevitably enters the mind.

Sick porochista khakpour