Fault Line Boy (A Mother's Reckoning with Epilepsy)

For readers of Joan Didion and Emily Rapp Black, Fault Line Boy follows one mother through the whiplash of raising a child with severe epilepsy. A clear-eyed memoir of medical motherhood, marriage under strain, and the hard-won joy that still finds its way in.

How do you stay upright in a world that won’t stop shaking?

When her youngest son, Lew, begins experiencing relentless seizures, the life Jen Murphy Parker thought she knew—and the ordinary chaos of raising four children—disappears overnight. What follows is a crash course in pediatric neurology: ambulance rides, ICU nights, medication trials, and the slow, brutal math of risk.

With lyrical precision and humor, Parker captures the story of endurance and recalibration, of marriage and motherhood under pressure, and of the strange intimacy that grows inside long-term caregiving.

Yet as Jen learns to live alongside uncertainty, she also finds a quiet thread of resilience: moments of joy, wonder, and real happiness. For parents, caregivers, and readers of narrative nonfiction, Fault Line Boy is an unflinching, luminous memoir about loving a child with rare pediatric epilepsy—and learning how to keep choosing a life, even when nothing feels steady.