This book was surprising, unpredictable, and better than I expected. Porochista Khakpour writes about being sick nearly her entire life, while consistently living a life which defies what many people would expect from a chronically ill person. Khakpour was born in Tehran in 1978 but was raised in Los Angeles after her family fled the Islamic Revolution and the Iran-Iraq war which formed her toddler memories. She had a lonely and painful childhood, during which at an unknown time she contracted Lyme disease. This went diagnosed for decades, and was compounded by the trauma of two major car crashes. Before she knew (or was willing to acknowledge) she was ill, Khakpour lived the reckless life of a mid-1990s college student in New York City, which involved parties wild with alcohol, cigarettes and causal drug use. She moved over and over, up to Baltimore for grad school, out to Pennsylvania for a university teaching position, to Santa Fe and Germany and New York and San Francisco and back to Los Angeles for jobs and residencies and breakdowns. Her health ebbed and flowed: periods of relative stability in which she was able to finish school, work as a magazine editor or a professor and finish her first book; other periods in which weekly trips to the ER or week-long hospital stays became the terrifying norm as Lyme eroded her ability to drive, walk, type, think, swallow food and sleep. This book is told mostly chronologically with chapters themed around place, as place often informed her health and the availability of medical care. I left it feeling rage at a medical system which often ignores or downplays the pain of women, astonishment at everything Khakpour has survived, a better understanding of this condition, and an extreme gratitude for my own health.