Sick: A Memoir

A Best Book of the Year: Real Simple, Entropy, Mental Floss, Bitch Media, The Paris Review, and LitHub

Time Magazine’s Best Memoirs of 2018 • GQ Best Nonfiction Book of 2018 

“Powerful . . . reads like a mystery and a reckoning with a love song at its core. . . . 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

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.

Boston Globe’s 25 Books We Can’t Wait to Read in 2018 • Buzzfeed’s 33 Most Exciting New Books • 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

“Sick should be required reading at every medical school!” —Kathleen Hanna

“Lucid, eloquent, and unflinchingly honest, Khakpour’s book is not just about a woman’s relationship to illness, but also a remarkably trenchant reflection on personal and human frailty. A courageously intimate memoir about living within a body that has “never felt at ease.” —Kirkus Reviews