She’s a wonderful writer and also an important voice in the Lyme / environmental sickness community.

“Hamish, I wanted to connect you with Porochista Khakpour, author of the memoir Sick. It was never a big deal for me to share with stranger online as I have been doing that, very much like now, hunched over a computer, when I really should be doing my work (or, er homework)-or sleeping! I have been doing this since I was 16. I have been “online” since 1994-AOL chat rooms, message boards, Livejournal, a Blogspot even. I wasn’t sure what this newsletter was about. Anyway she connected me with Substack’s co-founder Hamish McKenzie who had contacted her to do her Substack which was quite successful. I was very much suffering, and as usual very publicly-no, not for attention but because I had no choice-and I guess she wanted to help. Heather is a pretty popular writer of all kinds of nonfiction and has been known for her advice columns (I am fascinated by advice columnists as someone who was voted “Most Likely to Have Her Own Advice Column” in high school, lol!). When the writer Heather Havrilesky-who has a very popular Substack-contacted me in summer 2019 I was surprised she knew who I was. Maybe I should focus on my own history with Substack. Because you must have your own sources of secret money (I am reminded of a chaotic viral tweet I had on the topic of white people and their secret horses ), you must assume the rest of us do too. Substack apparently offered Jerry 250K and he turned it down -I thought it would be for all sorts of perhaps good reasons, but the reasons given were wild and further highlighted for me a feeling I often have these days: white people are becoming more and more unrelatable, but maybe they were this way all along and we just rounded up on them (as they round down on us, whee!) The replies just made me realize so many of you have no idea how little we make and as much as we disclose these amounts, over and over, it never sinks. It was such a nice night and then then I took my dog on a late night walk-he and I are both highly nocturnal wolves these days-and then I saw a Jerry Saltz post on Twitter that I have to say irked me. Proud to see my name here, though as I have written about it a lot, I suffered there quite a bit.) They are parents and they had their night off from kids so there was much drinking and eating and joy. I had a lovely late night spent in Brooklyn with old friends I knew from grad school (I only went to grad school for my MA, a terminal degree that was a one-year program then-shortly after my time in 2002-2003 it became a MFA-the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars. It’s a lovely Saturday dawn and I have not slept yet.

I know some of you probably just thought to support me, why not, someone told you to. I know some of you thought this would just be a follow-up to my memoir SICK.

Sick porochista