Porochista Khakpour: Bodily Chaos
The author on her new memoir, ‘Sick’; searching for home; and her struggle to be heard by the medical establishment
By Hillary Brenhouse
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…
