For readers of Nora Ephron, Tina Fey and Jenny Lawson, Gotham Girl Interrupted offers a hilarious, heartfelt, and fiercely candid memoir about life as a hapless writer, single parent, impassioned city girl, and epileptic.

Smart, harrowing, heart-warming, and very funny. –James Patterson

Smart stand-up comedy about the power of falling down, Gotham Girl Interrupted is loaded with brash truths and laugh-out-loud moments about the epileptic age and culture in which we all live. It’s also a dispatch from the frontlines of neurodiversity. Above all, it’s about the battle for becoming who you are supposed to be and finding your tribe–no matter how much flopping around on the ground and wetting yourself you have to do to get there.

With wit and humility, Alisa Kennedy Jones chronicles her experiences after a diagnosis of ecstatic epilepsy (also suffered by Dostoevsky, Van Gogh, Da Vinci and Agatha Christie). Beginning with the first in a series of terrifying yet beautiful grand mal seizures, which she likens to swallowing a bolt of lightning, each seizure leaves her with what Zen Buddhists sometimes refer to as a beginner’s mind –a vast, open expanse of headspace, coupled with a creative euphoria. It’s a state that renders you less encumbered by everything you’ve already learned, but also challenged by having to relearn some of the more basic aspects of daily life.