Sick

March 15, 2018
A distinguished Iranian-born writer and creative writing professor's memoir of her struggle with trauma, drug addiction, mental illness, and late-stage Lyme disease.Physical and mental pain had always defined Khakpour's (The Last Illusion, 2014, etc.) life. A child of the Iranian Revolution, her earliest memories were of "pure anxiety." She survived the trauma of living in a war zone and moved from Tehran to Los Angeles. As she grew into adolescence, she writes, "everything about my body felt wrong," and her feelings of dysmorphia remained one of the constants in an often chaotic life. In college, Khakpour, who had long been fascinated by the "altered states" that drugs could produce, began a "casual [long-term] relationship" with cocaine and cultivated the "heroin chic" look fashionable during the 1990s. In addition to her experimentation with drugs, the author endured harrowing experiences with sexual assault and depression. Khakpour's post-collegiate life brought with it a series of difficult, sometimes-abusive relationships, graduate school at Johns Hopkins, psychotropic drugs to control anxiety, insomnia, and mood disorders, severe health problems initially diagnosed as autoimmune disorders, and "a seesaw of struggling to survive in New York and then running home to LA and then escaping back to New York." Her life stabilized for a short time after she accepted a temporary position at Bucknell University. When her health began to fail again, she sought treatment in the New Age "healing vortex" of Santa Fe; but soon after she left, she once again became a prescription pill "drug addict." It was not until she returned temporarily to California that a doctor officially diagnosed her with a case of late-stage Lyme disease, which would mean permanent recurrences of the breakdowns she had fought to overcome. 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."

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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

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

May 1, 2018
From the time her family traveled to California to escape the wars in Iran, Khakpour claimed to not feel at home in her body. PTSD may have started her problems, but an undiagnosed case of Lyme disease haunted her. Her memoir, organized by the cities she's lived in, records her growing number of symptoms, ranging from headaches to insomnia, dizziness, pain, and suicidal thoughts. Her writing becomes secondary as she wanders from hospital to guru, searching for answers and trying everything from yoga, acupuncture, and mystics to medicines, psychiatrists, and emergency rooms. After thousands of dollars and a lifetime of seeking, Khakpour is finally diagnosed with Lyme disease and treated. She can't be fully healed, but she finally has an explanation of all her vague if painful symptoms and a course of action. She speaks frankly of her life and such issues as prescription medicine addiction and depression. Lyme disease is difficult to diagnose, and Khakpour's frank memoir will give hope to others who are struggling with this devastating illness.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)