Jen Murphy Parker joins us with her clear-eyed memoir of medical motherhood, marriage under strain, and the hard-won joy that still finds its way in.
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.
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.
Yet as Jen learns to live alongside uncertainty, she also finds a quiet thread of resilience: moments of joy, wonder, and happiness. With lyrical precision and levity, 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.
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 Speakers
Jen Murphy Parker earned her master’s degree from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism and is the author of a monthly Substack newsletter, Painting the Golden Gate, 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, Lew’s neurologist, Jen raised more than $2 million to establish a pediatric center for comprehensive epilepsy care at UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital.The mother of four children, she lives in Hillsborough, California, with her husband and youngest son.
Irena Smith is the author of the award-winning memoir, The Golden Ticket: A Life in College Admissions Essays and Troika: Three Generations, Three Days, and a Very American Road Trip. Her obsession with how words work began early (as a child growing up in Soviet Russia, she was known to occasionally stand on furniture and recite Pushkin poems). Irena's essays have appeared in Huffington Post, Writer’s Digest, and Electric Literature. She also writes two Substacks, Personal Statements and The Curmudgeon’s Guide to College Admissions, and lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband, a rotating cast of children, and two ungovernable cats. You can learn more about Irena here https://www.irenasmith.com/.
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