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A review by reads2cope
Sick: A Memoir by Porochista Khakpour
3.0
A difficult and enlightening memoir. Khakpour writes in loops that made it hard to distinguish one crash from another, but this confusion immersed me in a better understanding of her frustration and agony of being sick and having no cure, no clear cause, and often not even being taken seriously. The gaslighting she received was internalized, and even when she focused on getting better, she questioned if she was practicing self-care or if she was wallowing in depression. Heartbreaking to see how medical ignorance caused so much more pain, so much so that she began to lose her loved one and eventually found almost everyone untrustworthy.
At the same time, Khakpour seemed to be able to give herself some grace that she was unable to give to her friends. She acknowledges that she abused and was a drug user for a long time, but friends she did drugs with were “junkies” she had no respect for. When she found out another friend was a sex worker, she looked down on her and said their relationship was never the same.
Khakpour‘s relationship to whiteness was also hard to read. Her terror in moments of heightened xenophobia and Islamophobia were gutting, but at the same time she either missed or didn’t include any moments of solidarity with POC and Muslims in her community. Instead, she gushes about a US-government funded trip to Indonesia (why was the US finding these trips? No reflection on the motives there) and makes sure to mention that she traveled to Israel for a book project (no solidarity with long-running calls for cultural boycotts?) In a taxi with a white driver, she calls her mom but tells the man, “Just so you know, it’s Farsi. I’m Iranian but not one of the bad people. Please don’t be worried by my language.” As if, were she speaking Arabic, he could have had a legitimate problem, even seeming to suggest that there are Farsi speaking women in New York he should be worried about being near, but she’s one of the good ones. Khakpour acknowledges that she sometimes passed for white, and maybe it was the toll of her incredibly long journey of illness that kept her from interrogating her perspectives on xenophobia, but these stories felt shallow and jarring compared to the depth of her discussions around her sickness.
Even in those discussions, she sometimes seemed dismissive of other chronic illnesses, particularly ableist in her writings about mental health struggles, and ready to call one alternative health program a cult while completely buying into another. I hope in the time since she wrote this, her perspectives have been widened, especially in the COVID-19 pandemic, and her politics seem to have shifted based on her social medial posts alone, so I would be very interested in a second memoir from her, and hopeful that it would contain more solidarity.
At the same time, Khakpour seemed to be able to give herself some grace that she was unable to give to her friends. She acknowledges that she abused and was a drug user for a long time, but friends she did drugs with were “junkies” she had no respect for. When she found out another friend was a sex worker, she looked down on her and said their relationship was never the same.
Khakpour‘s relationship to whiteness was also hard to read. Her terror in moments of heightened xenophobia and Islamophobia were gutting, but at the same time she either missed or didn’t include any moments of solidarity with POC and Muslims in her community. Instead, she gushes about a US-government funded trip to Indonesia (why was the US finding these trips? No reflection on the motives there) and makes sure to mention that she traveled to Israel for a book project (no solidarity with long-running calls for cultural boycotts?) In a taxi with a white driver, she calls her mom but tells the man, “Just so you know, it’s Farsi. I’m Iranian but not one of the bad people. Please don’t be worried by my language.” As if, were she speaking Arabic, he could have had a legitimate problem, even seeming to suggest that there are Farsi speaking women in New York he should be worried about being near, but she’s one of the good ones. Khakpour acknowledges that she sometimes passed for white, and maybe it was the toll of her incredibly long journey of illness that kept her from interrogating her perspectives on xenophobia, but these stories felt shallow and jarring compared to the depth of her discussions around her sickness.
Even in those discussions, she sometimes seemed dismissive of other chronic illnesses, particularly ableist in her writings about mental health struggles, and ready to call one alternative health program a cult while completely buying into another. I hope in the time since she wrote this, her perspectives have been widened, especially in the COVID-19 pandemic, and her politics seem to have shifted based on her social medial posts alone, so I would be very interested in a second memoir from her, and hopeful that it would contain more solidarity.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Ableism, Addiction, Alcoholism, Chronic illness, Domestic abuse, Drug abuse, Drug use, Mental illness, Panic attacks/disorders, Racism, Sexual assault, Suicidal thoughts, Toxic relationship, Xenophobia, Islamophobia, Medical content, Grief, Medical trauma, Car accident, and Gaslighting