In addition to her experimentation with drugs, the author endured harrowing experiences with sexual assault and depression. In college, Khakpour, who had long been fascinated by the “altered states” that drugs could produce, began a “casual relationship” with cocaine and cultivated the “heroin chic” look fashionable during the 1990s. As she grew into adolescence, she writes, “everything about my body felt wrong,” and her feelings of dysmorphia remained one of the constants in an often chaotic life. A child of the Iranian Revolution, her earliest memories were of “pure anxiety.” She survived the trauma of living in a war zone and moved from Tehran to Los Angeles. Physical and mental pain had always defined Khakpour’s ( The Last Illusion, 2014, etc.) life. Her remarkable story is one of perseverance, survival, and hope.A distinguished Iranian-born writer and creative writing professor’s memoir of her struggle with trauma, drug addiction, mental illness, and late-stage Lyme disease. Khakpour writes honestly about her psychological struggle (“I spent most of my days feeling dead inside”) enduring a disease for which she’s treated, but for which there’s no cure. Her boyfriends and colleagues function as caretakers as she moves from one healer to another (settling in rural Pennsylvania with a boyfriend, she delights that “we built a real domestic life for ourselves for the first time”). With no definitive answer from the medical community, she developed an addiction to benzodiazepines for relief. Fainting, hallucinations, and dangerously high fevers limited her activity. Her parents believed her health would improve as she got older, but as an adult, her physical and psychiatric symptoms increased in severity and occurrence.
From insomnia to hand tremors, her unusual symptoms were at first attributed to PTSD (Khakpour was born in Tehran in 1978 her family fled the country during revolution and settled in L.A.). From the time she was about five, she recalls feeling something was always “off” inside her body. Khakpour ( The Last Illusion) incisively tells of living with a mystery illness that is eventually diagnosed as late-stage Lyme disease.
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