Resisting the easy narrative which many memoirs follow in dealing with chronic illness, Khakpour reenacts the struggle not toward resolution, but simply toward diagnosis itself. Organized by setting and suffused with uncertainty and a sense of dislocation, Sick is a story of transformation and struggle that refuses defensiveness or moralizing. Placing herself in a history of women who have been treated as unreliable witnesses to the chaos inside of them, the book also becomes, in its own way, a feminist consideration of illness and treatment.