100 Books Like Epilepsy

Dr. Carson’s story is an inspiration and is an example of how a person can overcome obstacles.

Through reading Dr. Carson’s book, I was reminded that it is important to not use life circumstances to deter you from pursuing your goals. I was inspired by Ben’s determination to not let people’s opinions about him stop him from going to college and being successful.

As a person who has had epilepsy brain surgery, I enjoyed reading about his experiences as a neurosurgeon. Parts of this book were heart-touching and made me cry. It was encouraging to learn about how one person can make a huge impact on other people’s lives.

I enjoyed reading about how a woman’s epilepsy impacted her life and yet she also pursued her dreams.

As a person who has had seizures and has gone through epilepsy brain surgery, I felt her determination and struggles to live each day not knowing if a seizure would happen. I could relate to her motivation and courage to earn a college degree and undergo brain surgery to obtain a better quality of life. While each person’s story is different, Deanna Brady’s story and mine story have some things in common.

I could relate to Abby’s struggles of living with epilepsy and how her family was impacted by her seizures.

I liked that Abby explained what she felt before she had a seizure, the emotional toll her epilepsy took on her, and how her seizures impacted her everyday life. I liked that Abby explained how she dealt with having seizures in high school and college. I enjoyed reading about her determination to earn a college degree despite having seizures.

I found her story to be inspirational and one that I could relate to since we both have experience with having epilepsy.

I liked learning about the different types of epilepsy and the terminology pertaining to epilepsy. I enjoyed learning about different forms of treatment for epilepsy, such as vagus nerve stimulation, responsive neurostimulation, and deep brain stimulation. I liked learning about practical ways that people with epilepsy can manage their seizures.

It was refreshing to read a book written by a neurologist that recognizes that the side effects of seizure medications are serious and that the whole person is important when considering what treatment to provide to a person with epilepsy. I liked reading about the medical tests that are used to diagnose people that might have epilepsy and what the results mean. I appreciated reading about how epilepsy and seizure medication impact women.

When my depression was intense, I was continually worried that something would happen to me or my family. It was a visceral fear, one that ranked up there with a child’s belief that something was hiding under the bed.

To read this story of the author’s experiences with her son’s epilepsy diagnosis was surprisingly comforting for me. She too was terrified, and yet she made her way through, as moms so often manage to do.

I loved this book’s tender, funny, well-crafted words about how little we really can control in our lives. It reminded me that worry won’t make the future brighter, but it will make the present darker.

Claire is an irreverent delight in person, but you won’t see much of that persona in her stories – this book is heavy with gooey and bizarre body horror that always has a deeply personal context for her characters.

She’s admitted that writing is a vehicle for talking about her epilepsy, but you don’t need to share that with her to relate to the strange changes that take place on her pages.

This is just her first collection, an opening salvo across the bow of Australian horror, so it will be interesting indeed to see how her work evolves and metamorphosises over time – to meet the creature that crawls, slime-slicked and hungry, from the casing of her next books.

This is the book that made me want to write a historical romance. The protagonist, Miss Jane Fairfield, is outlandishly rich. But she can’t get married and leave her younger sister, who has epilepsy, to the well-meaning but cruel treatments recommended by their uncle, who is also their guardian. Since her money makes her an appealing target for many an impoverished rake, Jane has to work extra to become unappealing while still seeming like she’s trying to attract a man. She wears obnoxiously bright clothing, insults people with the kindest tone, and—in one desperate attempt to make a man be mean to her—takes the food right off his plate. This is a book about people trying to put you in your place and keep you small. And let me give you a hint: it’s a romance, so there’s definitely a Happily Ever After, and that includes small-minded people getting their… show more.

When sixteen-year-old Leilani and her father traveled to O’ahu from Hilo to try a promising but experimental treatment for her epilepsy, they never expected to be stranded in the middle of a worldwide geomagnetic storm. With tsunamis striking randomly, all modern technology broken, and facing food shortages under martial law, Leilani and her father have to fight their way home. Along the way, Leilani discovers that the one thing that makes her different may be the one thing that saves us all. It’s an apocalyptic page-turner centered on Hawaii’s ecology and traditional cultural solutions.

The Spiral Staircase is the book I’ve read the most number of times as an adult. It is the autobiography of Karen Armstrong who was a Catholic nun for six years in the 1960s in the UK. The book picks up after she leaves her convent and is studying English literature at Oxford University. She is also suffering from mysterious episodes of fainting and memory loss, and so we are taken into her struggles with both academia and the psychiatry of the 1970s. She then spirals through other careers and eventually returns to God – not now as a person of faith but as a writer about religion – its beauty and its tension.

This is perhaps the most honest book I’ve read, as it unflinchingly describes the experience of making terrible mistakes – as we almost all do – without blame or self-flagellation. Karen Armstrong learns, in the end,… show more.

I love this meditation on magic, parenting a child with a medical condition, and intimate partner violence for its honesty and bravery.

Hillary Leftwich doesn’t shy away from discussing traumatic events and her own decisions that left her life feeling unmoored and the magical pathways that helped her come back to herself. Fearless and insightful, this was one of my favorite memoirs in recent years.