I have really mixed feelings about David B.'s graphic memoir Epileptic, about his childhood with an older brother, Jean-Christophe, who has severe epilepsy. When his brother starts to have seizures in the 1970s, David's family is desperate for answers and takes Jean-Christophe to all kinds of alternative treatment practitioners when all mainstream medicine had to offer was medication that didn't work or left him with horrible side-effects, or brain surgery. It comes across as not just a tragic story for Jean-Christophe, but also David and his sister, who keep having their lives uprooted and routines built around Jean-Christophe's treatments.

The book doesn't try to fill in the knowledge gaps that David and his parents had, and given the fact that it's a memoir of his childhood and his relationship with his brother, that makes sense on some level. Unfortunately it might serve to reinforce stigma and misinformation about people with epilepsy today because it doesn't get into things like how we now know epilepsy is not a psychiatric illness, and it only really gives voice to Jean-Christophe near the very end. The book feels more about empathizing with the author, and you're still left with this resentment and blame for Jean-Christophe. On the one hand it's his experience, but I wonder if the audience might miss important lessons about what it's like to be someone with epilepsy or even how to respond better than rubbernecking if you see someone having a seizure.

That aside, the book is powerful but I felt it could've used a bit of editing down on the discussion of what happened in David's life when Jean-Christophe wasn't around. There were a lot of depictions of his time in art school and dreams that were tangentially related, but at some point I found myself wanting to skim read them to get back to what was happening with Jean-Christophe and their family.