I feel really ashamed and unhappy at all the unhappiness i am causing. I thought we could try one thing that i tried to ask the other night that embarrassed me - i wonder if you would consider sleeping in my room? I can keep your exact schedule. A letter from the author to her mother reads: “ dear mom, i am sorry for any trouble i am causing. When the peak of illness takes her over in New York City, she seeks the safety of “a parental component.” Still she must persuade her parents that her illness is real. As she wrenches through her body’s reckoning, they deny her, disbelieve her, and retreat from the facts of her illness. “I don’t belong to any culture.” Living in America, the proximity of an excellent school system “was all that mattered to my parents, my future still a thing not ruined.” The most heartbreaking parts of the memoir are in her relationships, ever changing, with her parents. “I’ve been an outsider my whole life,” Khakpour stated in an interview with Eye Level Magazine. “ This isn’t your home, my father would say when we got to the US. When she emigrated with her parents to the States, she was told for years that the move was temporary, that she oughtn’t think of putting down roots. In pinning down her body’s reasons, Khakpour ponders if she would have been less sick if she’d had a home. The issue of where would be the most mysterious of all.” I’d be destined to never find the bite on the location of my body, just as I’d be destined to never know the location I was in when bit by the tick. She explains: “It occurred to me that it wasn’t character or plot or even theme that was the ruling principle of its composition, but something far less likely: setting.

The memoir itself is segmented by cities, the path of Lyme trailing Khakpour from Iran to Los Angeles, New York, Maryland, Pennsylvania, New Mexico, and beyond. Khakpour traces her symptoms throughout her life, from her childhood in Tehran to her family’s emigration to the states, never fully feeling at home in the span of cities she lives. When she is diagnosed with Lyme disease in 2011, after years of symptoms without clear cause, after hundreds of thousands of dollars in medical bills, after roaming the world without answers and looking for a home in every place she lands, she feels at last that she has been given a reason, that the narrative of dis-ease in her life at last makes sense. In Sick: A Memoir, author Porochista Khakpour reckons with the history of her body.

Porochista khakpour lyme disease