Sick

As the title suggests, this audiobook depicts Khakpour's lifelong struggle with chronic illness and the complications that come along with it. Narrator Yetta Gottesman does an excellent job voicing a complex story that follows the lead of memory rather than chronology. Her voice inspires empathy, and her performance of dialogue is organic and easy to follow. Understandably, the memoir can be exhausting: Khakpour's journey through the mysteries of Lyme disease, the nuances of the medical system, strained personal relationships, and the side effects of her illness can weigh heavily on the listener. Gottesman's compassionate influence, though, reminds us that our fatigue is but a fraction of what the author endures daily. L.B.F. � AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine

March 26, 2018
Khakpour (The Last Illusion) incisively tells of living with a mystery illness that is eventually diagnosed as late-stage Lyme disease. From the time she was about five, she recalls feeling something was always “off” inside her body. From insomnia to hand tremors, her unusual symptoms were at first attributed to PTSD (Khakpour was born in Tehran in 1978; her family fled the country during revolution and settled in L.A.). Her parents believed her health would improve as she got older, but as an adult, her physical and psychiatric symptoms increased in severity and occurrence. Fainting, hallucinations, and dangerously high fevers limited her activity. With no definitive answer from the medical community, she developed an addiction to benzodiazepines for relief. Her boyfriends and colleagues function as caretakers as she moves from one healer to another (settling in rural Pennsylvania with a boyfriend, she delights that “we built a real domestic life for ourselves for the first time”). Khakpour writes honestly about her psychological struggle (“I felt spent most of my days feeling dead inside”) enduring a disease for which she’s treated, but for which there’s no cure. Her remarkable story is one of perseverance, survival, and hope.

May 1, 2018

Novelist Khakpour (The Last Illusion) recalls escaping revolution and war in Iran with her parents in the 1980s and relocating to the suburbs of Los Angeles. Storytelling helped her survive a childhood in which she experienced fainting and tremors, symptoms that stayed with her through adulthood. Khakpour is painfully honest about her drug use and lingering cocaine addiction, wondering if that impacted her mysterious illness, later confirmed to be Lyme disease. The author shines when recounting the years of dealing with skeptical doctors, often while lacking health insurance, and how depression and insomnia affected her personal and professional life. She conveys the transient life of an academic, from Pennsylvania to New Mexico to Germany, often the lone Iranian on campus or in town. The narrative can be exasperating, as she pursues partners who are also willing to assume a caretaker role. Still, Khakpour writes cogently about modern health issues: dating while chronically ill, using GoFundMe to crowdsource payment for medical bills, and navigating alternative medicine and mysticism. VERDICT A sometimes challenging memoir of feeling out of place, both inside and outside of one's own body; yet Khakpour brings a fresh perspective on how women live and cope with mental and chronic illness.--Stephanie Sendaula, Library Journal

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