I think that books about chronic illness and the experiences of women of colour accessing healthcare are essential, but I did not like this book. Here’s the thing. I think that explorations of trauma and illness, of gender and illness, of race and illness, are all so important. I think exploring women’s illness, and illnesses such as Lyme, and calling out how they are often characterized as psychiatric is needed. I think that avoiding narratives of sick then well, of triumph over what is in fact...

Alright this review is so goddamn long it’s like i practically wrote my own memoir…… my apologies. This could have been 1,000 words longer so trust me I’m really sparing everyone. I also gave up on editing grammar bc this is goodreads where i read for fun and i was getting school flashbacks. Anyway enjoy. It is very difficult to write a memoir that is not insufferable or embarrassing, and sadly this book did not escape those fates. I was excited to read this book as I am also a chronically ill

2.5/5 stars I feel bad for not liking this book. However, like others have said, although this book’s content is important, the execution was poor. At first, I was excited to read this because when I saw the cover, I saw a part of myself. As an Asian woman who copes with a chronic illness, I felt connected to Khakpour even before reading her memoir. I learned about Lyme disease through Avril Lavigne; she was diagnosed with it a few years ago. I remember watching her interview and feeling shocke

It’s hard to summarize Sick as one thing. As an exercise in beautiful writing, it is a five star book. As a memoir, it is profound and selective, escaping all those traps of a person telling her own story (none of the usual weight of narratives that mean much to the teller and little to the listener). But for better or worse, Sick carries another burden: it is a book about illness, and in particular an illness that is often over-diagnosed and misunderstood. The author believes she has “chronic L...

A hot mess of cluster-b melodrama and pseudoscientific word salad.(Read Lying: a metaphorical memoir by Lauren Slater instead.)

I do not have cohesive thoughts about this book. I cannot, and I may never. I can't decide if I want to give it 4 or 5 stars, or whether I loved it or hated it or thought it was good or bad writing or why I consistently want to treat life in binary or why any of this matters in the end.I know two things:1. I could not read this for more than small stretches at a time. Once, it sent me into a hot and prickly panic attack, after which I fell asleep and dreamt half-concocted nightmares of relapse.2...

A finely wrought memoir of Khakpour’s battle with Lyme disease and, more broadly, how the early trauma and displacement of her childhood intertwines and muddies the challenge of “putting a name” to the cause of her symptoms. A personal fascination, for me, was the revelation that Khakpour and I are almost exactly the same age - she has lived so much more life than I have that I would have referred her to as one of the “older girls” had we been at the same school. Beautiful writing from the sente...

i wanted to give this 2 stars because 1 feels mean but this was really underwhelming and actively bad in a lot of ways. i feel like i could not tell you a single thing that happened in this book in any detail despite having just finished it. it was disjointed and shallow and narcissistic and basically just a slightly fleshed out list of events in her life. the two things that do stand out to me are not good: she's like my friend's a sex worker (though she says prostitute...) and that makes her m...

This might be my biggest reading disappointment of the year so far. I have been looking forward to this book for ages and when it finally arrived I jumped straight into reading it. I find the story Porochista Khakpour tells - of illness that went years without a diagnosis, about racism and sexism in medicine, about addiction and losing oneself - so very very important and relevant, but the execution just did not work for me. I found the structure of the book unhelpful, the jumping back and forth...

“I sometimes wonder if I would have been less sick if I had a home.”

I was really looking forward to this book. My husband battled late stage Lyme for 5 years and I had it for one and a half agonizing years. Most everyone I know (I live in a rural, Upstate, NY) has had it.I think it is crucial to share the difficulties and problems in getting treated for such a mysterious disease - especially for women. I was told it was "only menopause". Women's health issues have been dismissed for ages, so I really wanted to love this book. I hated it. It was a jumbled, repeti...

I have fascinated with Porochista Khakpour for years. It was so wonderful to actually meet the real Porochista in real life and sort of fall in love with the actual person. Reading her memoir, SICK, was a fascinating entry into the actual life woman behind the tweets -- so much of the stories in this book was already familiar in a strange way -- and FB posts and the essays and novels. It felt almost like a privilege, to read her actual story. I am in awe of how honest this book is. And well craf...

Given that an official diagnosis doesn't come until 40 pages from the end, Sick is less a memoir about having Lyme disease than a memoir about having a mysterious illness that baffles doctors, results in a lot of inappropriate (and expensive) treatments, and is routinely viewed as purely psychological (an infuriatingly common scenario for women). For that reason alone, this book is valuable. Indeed, because of my interest in the topic, I broke my new resolution to avoid current memoirs in order

Excerpt from review posted on my book blog, TheBibliophage.com.Porochista Khakpour spends much of this book talking about relationships. Sometimes it’s her parents or girlfriends. But more often it’s the men in her life. I’ve seen reviewers bemoan this. But here’s what I think. A single young woman, battling chronic, mostly unexplained, illness has a natural need for caregivers. As much as Khakpour these are romantic relationships, her writing about them centers more often on how the men interac...

I'm only giving this 1 star because there isn't the option of giving it zero stars.This book is....ugh. It promotes so many dangerous ideas that are gaining hold within the chronic illness/disability community and the fact that it's been on so many "must read" lists gives it an air of legitimacy. The kind of quackery the author is selling is so insidious and harmful (and literally kills chronically ill and disabled people), and reading her ideas about how "glamorous" she thinks certain aspects o...

This reads exactly like a Livejournal: the writing is flimsy, self-obsessed, and incredibly shallow. Besides her many illnesses, (and yes that does sound hellish, I certainly have empathy for her there), she goes on and on about this person and that person having a trust fund (coming from someone that attends an Ivy League college no less), the various outfits she wore in 2006, all the drugs she took between the years 1999-2015, etc, etc. Any person she encounters is barely detailed and they wei...

Porochista Khakpour can’t remember a time when she didn’t feel unwell and like she wanted to escape. “I had no idea what normal was. I never felt good,” she writes in her bracing memoir. Related to this sense of not being at home in her body was the feeling of not having a place where she fit in. Throughout Sick, Khakpour gives excellent descriptions of physical and mental symptoms. Her story is a powerful one of being mired in sickness and not getting the necessary help from medical professiona...

Anyone interested in this book absolutely has to read this review in the New York Review of books by an actual doctor. https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/07...While this memoir might be interesting, it's an exercise in delusion, and it might well do more damage than good in the world. As this review puts it, "to insist beyond all plausibility that one’s suffering is related to a tick bite is not feminist; it’s absurd. And to prey on suffering people who crave that certainty, offering them expens...

while kind of interesting, it was self-indulgant and too focused on how 'odd' the author is. Its not really a story about Lyme, or even being sick really. I didn't feel the author showed how she was odd, she just kept saying it. I got pretty bored reading how weird she felt, but how normal she seemed.

”the deal with so many chronic illnesses is that most people don’t want to believe you. They will tell you that you look great, that it might be in your head, that it is likely stress, that everything will be okay. None of these are the right thing to say to someone whose entire existence is a fairly consistent torture of the body and mind. They say it because they are well-intentioned usually, because they wish you the best, but they also say it because you make them uncomfortable. Your existen...