More specifically, Sick jumps back and forth through time, though it indirectly moves towards the future, with many of the chapters focused on a particular place. There is no teleological movement with Khakpour emerging triumphantly from illness into a lasting and permanent health instead, as anyone who is chronically ill knows all too well, the book is circumscribed within cycles of illness and cycles of being well. This sense of displacement is embedded right into the structure of Sick because it does not follow a convention of memoirs to travel chronologically in time rather, the narrative is a disjunctive one. During one particularly bad bout of sickness, when her diagnosis was continually characterized as solely psychological as opposed to physical or infectious, Khakpour returns to her parents’ home in California and thinks: “Every part of my body felt like its wiring was all wrong, I felt like a foreigner in a hostile country, never adjusting or accepting I couldn’t quite fight it, but I could not be at peace with it either.”Ī sick body, in many ways, is a displaced body and Khakpour’s book wrestles with the ways in which she embodied (is embodying) both. Consequently, an ongoing theme of the book is interrogating the connection between not feeling a full sense of belonging to a home (whether this home is an individual identity or an entire nation) with the experience of illness. While Khakpour does not shy away from detailing how Lyme disease is oftentimes a lived and agonizing reality, Sick employs Lyme disease-and chronic illness, more broadly-as a metaphor representing immigration and diaspora. In prose that’s wrapped close to the body, Khakpour describes this complicated disease-how it is spread through tick bites and how it affects each individual differently, thereby making it difficult to research and treat-and vividly illustrates how it impacted her relationships with her parents, friends, partners and writing projects Only a toddler when she immigrated from Iran with her parents amidst the Iran-Iraq War, she settled in California before moving to New York, New Mexico, Illinois, and Germany during her adulthood Khakpour’s first book of nonfiction covers expansive terrain in terms of physical landscape, but also turns inward as she recounts how she navigated and suffered (or, rather, navigates and suffers, in the present tense) from a wide spectrum of symptoms, health conditions and healthcare politics until, after years of misdiagnoses, she tested positive for late-stage Lyme disease.
In Sick, Porochista Khakpour explores the entanglements of immigration and illness, addiction and ability, in a memoir that spans her early childhood to the near present.
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