Porochista Khakpour: Bodily Chaos

What is the body but a first and imperfect home? And if the body is a home, then illness can be like an eviction notice, or a bad deed of sale. Illness can make you a vagrant.

Porochista Khakpour’s recent memoir, Sick, has been described as a narrative of malady, but it is also a story of displacement. Born in Tehran in 1978, the writer was a child of revolution and war, and then a refugee; when she was three her family fled to America, which for decades her father insisted was a place of temporary settlement. As an adult she has been in almost perpetual movement, and Sick is structured by the cities (among them, LA, Leipzig, Santa Fe, New York) that she passes between, and the various men who shape and bear witness to her life. At the center of the book and this enduring rootlessness is late-stage Lyme disease, a host of nebulous ailments. But even before any diagnosis, Khakpour experiences herself as ethereal, barely there, only very loosely tethered to a body that cannot be the house of her. “My shell was not something meant to contain me,” she writes. This lack of wholeness, a sort of fading, makes her feel like a ghost, and also like a woman.

“I want to have substance,” Khakpour, the author of two novels and an essayist, tells me in the interview that follows. “I want to exist. You think of the coming-of-age narrative, and I’m still coming of being.”

Lyme, which is caused by the bacteria Borrelia burgdorferi and transmitted by a tick bite, is a controversial disease because unknowable. The symptoms of it are countless and ever-shifting, testing is flawed, and, as Khakpour points out here, nearly every patient who is diagnosed with Lyme is the beneficiary of some psychiatric diagnosis, too. She herself struggles with afflictions ranging from lethargy, neuropathy, and extreme dizziness to addiction and insomnia, and to be taken seriously, to be heard and believed. In the cultural imagination, Lyme and other poorly understood disorders are considered the province of women and women are considered unreliable narrators of their own pain. Doctors who claim to recognize the physicality of Khakpour’s illness still ask that she take drugs for the mind so that she might “clear a path” toward her bodily suffering. Desperate for the name of her sickness and then for a cure, she visits a psych ward, a Sufi healer, a hypnotherapist, a woman who stings her with bees and to whom this memoir is dedicated, many emergency rooms. As of her writing, she had spent more than $140,000 on treatment.

is not redemptive. Khakpour doesn’t get well. The book mirrors the tender mess of her everyday; it is feverish and dark and beautifully disoriented. But, while utterly interior, it also carries forward a cultural conversation at the intersection of health, politics, gender, and race. In one searing interlude between chapters, she reveals