Silence and Seizure
Parenting Through Complexity
Christine Stewart-Nuñez author
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Wilfrid Laurier University Press
Publishing:15th Sep '26
£22.99
This title is due to be published on 15th September, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
Silence and Seizure is a memoir about raising a son with a rare epilepsy syndrome-about the fear of seizures and the fear of unknown futures.
The story starts when Christine Stewart-Nuñez’s plan for a stable life disintegrates. She chases a diagnosis for her son Holden’s odd behavior and lapses in language, and she watches her marriage to Holden’s father end, understanding these changes through the lens of illness and its silences.
Seizing in ditches, apple-picking, appetizing shards of glass, a Picasso at the Tate, midnight ambulances, panic attacks at 37,000 feet, and mini-ninjas. Epilepsy impaired Holden, but for a time, Christine’s lack of knowledge created a barrier that disabled him. As she learns to be an advocate, her parenting process begins to parallel her artistic practice: observe, research, reflect, create, revise. With the wisdom of disabled writers serving as touchstones for reflection, Silence and Seizure captures how the lens of disability helped Christine frame the nuances of her experience as she developed tactics for living a more complex life where both mother and son can flourish.
"Christine Stewart-Nuñez’s story is an essential one that fills a gap in family disability narratives in Canadian literature. In Silence and Seizure, Stewart-Nuñez incorporates the ideas of key disability scholars and seamlessly draws insights from her own lived experience to highlight our common humanity and the ways we are interconnected. She resists problematic 'good/bad' dichotomous thinking about disability, and introduces readers to novel ways of perceiving the disability caregiving experience. Stewart-Nuñez leans into the liminal spaces of the in-between with her son Holden, she loves him unconditionally, and finds personal resolve in the process. Approached with academic vigour, these pages are filled with a fierce intellect embossed with tenderness. This book is a manual of hope for caregivers who remain focused on 'the Plan' of life, while simultaneously providing an illuminating look through the window of the caregiver experience for the wider world. Fresh, original, and necessary, Silence and Seizure is poetic, gorgeously rendered, and deeply moving. A must-read." - Adelle Purdham, author of I Don't Do Disability And Other Lies I've Told Myself
ISBN: 9781771127332
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
300 pages