A Best Book of the Year: Real Simple, Entropy, Mental Floss, Bitch Media, The Paris Reivew, and LitHub . Time Magazine's Best Memoirs of 2018 - Boston Globe's 25 Books We Can't Wait to Read in 2018 Buzzfeed's 33 Most Exciting New Books GQ Best Non Fiction Book of 2018 Bustle's 28 Most Anticipated Nonfiction Books of 2018 list Nylon's 50 Books We Can't Wait to Read in 2018 Electric Literature's 46 Books to Read By Women of Color in 2018 "Porochista Khakpour's powerful memoir, Sick , reads like a mystery and a reckoning with a love song at its core. Humane, searching, and unapologetic, is about the thin lines and vast distances between illness and wellness, healing and suffering, the body and the self. Khakpour takes us all the way in on her struggle toward health with an intelligence and intimacy that moved, informed, and astonished me ." -- Cheryl Strayed, New York Times bestselling author of Wild A powerful, beautifully rendered memoir of chronic illness, misdiagnosis, addiction, and the myth of full recovery. For as long as author Porochista Khakpour can remember, she has been sick. For most of that time, she didn't know why. Several drug addictions, some major hospitalizations, and over $100,000 later, she finally had a diagnosis: late-stage Lyme disease. is Khakpour's grueling, emotional journey--as a woman, an Iranian-American, a writer, and a lifelong sufferer of undiagnosed health problems--in which she examines her subsequent struggles with mental illness and her addiction to doctor prescribed benzodiazepines, that both aided and eroded her ever-deteriorating physical health. Divided by settings, Khakpour guides the reader through her illness by way of the locations that changed her course--New York, LA, Santa Fe, and a college town in Germany--as she meditates on the physiological and psychological impacts of uncertainty, and the eventual challenge of accepting the diagnosis she had searched for over the course of her adult life. A story of survival, pain, and transformation, candidly examines the colossal impact of illness on one woman's life by not just highlighting the failures of a broken medical system but by also boldly challenging our concept of illness narratives. Porochista Khakpour's debut novel, "Sons and Other Flammable Objects", was named a "New York Times" Editor's Choice, one of the "Chicago Tribune"'s Fall's Best and the 2007 California Book Award winner in the First Fiction category. Her honours include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars, Northwestern University, the Sewanee Writers' Conference, Ucross, and Yaddo. Her non-fiction has appeared in or is forthcoming in "Harper's", the "New York Times", the "Los Angeles Times", "Spin", "Slate" and "Salon", among many others. Khakpour currently teaches at Columbia University's MFA programme, Ford University and Wesleyan University. She lives in New York City. Medical - General Diseases - General