![]() Sick is Khakpours grueling, emotional journey - as a woman, an Iranian-American, a writer. ![]() Several drug addictions, some major hospitalizations, and over 100,000 later, she finally had a diagnosis: late-stage Lyme disease. For most of that time, she didnt know why. Her friends, she writes, “were free spirits, losers, anarchists, skaters, punks, taggers, club kids, strippers, professional junkies.” “Losers”-but not real losers, more people with big, if vague, hopes experimenting in loserdom while awaiting the unfolding of their bright futures. For as long as author Porochista Khakpour can remember, she has been sick. In her new memoir, Sick, she describes herself as the “girl” in “neo–Malcolm X glasses and black turtleneck … who subsisted on coffee and cigarettes and bagels” and also the girl for whom to lose the dream of being a successful writer would be shattering the girl who “knew where to drink without being carded” and also the girl who never asked herself if doing something illegal could reap any long-term consequences the girl “making out with girls casually as if it was nothing to me” and also the girl who never wondered if beginning her romantic life “as if it meant nothing” could, frighteningly, make it nothing, in a bad way, in the long term. She was an embodiment of that brief era’s pledge that-unlike at any other time in history-a person coming of age could have everything. ![]() ![]() In the space of two decades, she had gone from a trembling child refugee from a religious autocracy to a savvy, black-spectacled, drug-and-sex-dabbling student at Sarah Lawrence, at once fresh beyond all comprehension and wise beyond her years. Khakpour’s life, on paper, represented all that perfectly. ![]()
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