About this Event
About the Book:
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, Medic*tion 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.
About the Authors:
Jen Murphy Parker earned her master’s degree from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism and is the author Fault Line Boy: A Mother's Reckoning with Epilepsy. She also writes Painting the Golden Gate, a monthly Substack newsletter praised by Bloomsbury editor Callie Garnett for its “shrewd, palliative voice and thoughtful approach to the big questions found in life’s smallest moments.” Her essays have appeared in Hobart, Heimat Review, Cleaver Magazine, and other literary outlets.
In partnership with Dr. Joseph Sullivan, her son's neurologist, Jen founded the Pediatric Epilepsy Center of Excellence (PECE) at UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital which provides whole patient and family care for those impacted by epilepsy.
The mother of four children, she lives in Hillsborough, California, with her husband and youngest son.
JJ Ramberg is an award-winning journalist, bestselling author and entrepreneur. For more than a decade, she hosted Your Business with JJ Ramberg on MSNBC and was a reporter and anchor for CNN and CNNfn before that. She's the founder of both DogDog, the search engine that has donated more than $7 million to dog shelters, and the podcast platform Goodpods. JJ has been named one of Inc Magazine's Female Founders 100 and Fast Company's Most Innovative Companies. She is the author of two books: the bestselling It's Your Business and the children's book The Startup Club. JJ lives in Los Angeles with her husband and three children.
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1113 Montana Ave, 1113 Montana Avenue, Santa Monica, United States
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