![]() From that beginning, fleeing Tehran as a child with her parents, she is on the move. It begins in the narrative present, then leaps back into the past, to the beginning of Khakpour’s life. Like the bacteria at the root of Lyme disease, this memoir spirals through time, rather than moving in a straight line. She combs through her life for answers, clues, breadcrumbs: Is this when I got sick? Is this? Reading her life in the present, we already know the whodunit of this mystery, but as Khakpour lived it, she did not. Khakpour spends years in and out of hospitals, misdiagnosed, treated for varying ailments that are symptoms of Lyme rather than Lyme itself, routed to psychologists, prescribed drugs that lead her into addiction. And sick people, sick women, especially women of color, are doubted. Yet the experience of illness lends itself to fiction, to the surreal: it distorts your perception of reality, your trust in your own body. The writer’s truth asserts the truth of personal experience, of life, over the truth of simple facts. Memoir is, among other things, an assertion of truth. Against the projections of doctors, family, and lovers, Khakpour sets down what it is to exist within the space of that encounter, struggling toward the truth of her experience. ![]() ![]() ![]() To be sick is to slide between dualities that separate body and mind, health and illness, fact and fiction. Porochista Khakpour’s Sick: A Memoir insists on sickness as an experience that collapses boundaries. ![]()
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