Skip to main content Skip to navigation

Disability and Intersectionality Book Club, Sick: A Memoir Part 3

Online
Registration

About the event

Join the Access Center for the Disability and Intersectionality Book Club! The Disability and Intersectionality Book Club is an online community that empowers the WSU students, faculty, and staff to support and advocate for disability issues through thought provoking discussions centered around disability literature. This club creates a space for discussion, live chats, author Q&As and more. Every semester (excluding the summer months) the club will focus on one book discussing disability issues that can be easily accessible to all readers. A set amount of digital copies of each book will be available to registered Access Center students based on financial need and their interest in the book.

Sick: A Memoir

by: Porochista Khakpour

Chapters 8-11

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.

Sick 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, Sick 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.

 

 

Contact