A beautiful and devastating book. As someone who has grown up with a brother with epilepsy, whose early life was very similar to Lew’s, I saw a lot of my childhood in this book. I was the other sibling, the healthy one, the Glass Child. But the fear that Parker writes about, the sudden and unexpected trauma of a seizure, were so real.

Her account of living with epilepsy gave truth to my lived experience. The way it will take and take, how it doesn’t stop for birthdays or roadtrips or life events. Her writing was profound and deeply emotional, I saw my only family reflected in these pages. Sharing something this personal is admirable, and I’m grateful for her for doing so. Beautiful prose and a real, honest voice around epilepsy, something I feel is deeply underwritten and understood.

Jen Murphy Parker thought she had a pretty standardly perfect family until the arrival of her fourth child, son Lew….odd shivering noticed in his infancy progressed to seizures, and he turned out to have a genetic mutation that gave him intractable epilepsy, with a relatively high risk of death and a host of limitations that would prevent him from becoming independent and self-sufficient if he did survive. to adulthood. The author makes clear what an immense struggle it was to keep Lew safe and also to give her other children full lives; even as the family could thankfully afford the help that Lew needed to manage from day to day, hospital trips with Lew became a way of life. Medication ultimately helped more than was initially expected, but Lew’s experience and that of his family would be indelibly marked by his condition. Still, this is a hopeful and well-written book that reflects the love of a family through massive challenges and the worthiness of celebration of life even if it is not the life that might once have been imagined.