You Don't Look Like Anyone I Know: A True Story of Family, Face Blindness, and Forgiveness

Prepare yourself for sorrow and stark reality in You Don’t Look like Anyone I Know. Illness propels this memoir, but the author’s self-discovery of her face blindness and demands that her neurologist properly diagnose her far outweighed any disquietude experienced by this reader.

Coping with face blindness, the inability to recognize faces reliably seemed to me a secondary theme of this incredible memoir. Ms. Sellers’ real triumph was surviving the war zone created by the illnesses of her parents. Her mother’s paranoid tendencies, magnified by her protective instincts toward her children, were bizarre. Desperately desirous but fearful of seeing her father, Sellers manages to come to grips with his philandering and show more cross-dressing.

In her book trailer, Ms. Sellers explains that prosopagnosia is a memory not a visual problem. She writes charitably and honestly about the family that branded her the crazy one. I didn’t mind that her writing lacked cohesion at times. I thought it accurately reflected the chaos of her childhood. She manages to keep enough distance between herself and her story that I saw no self-pity. Rather she spoke graciously of her parents. At the end of her memoir she states that “deeply flawed love and deeply flawed vision can coexist.”

Reviewing a disturbing book is difficult. Many other reviewers have complained about yet another “disturbing childhood/dysfunctional family memoir.” I agree many of those exist, but I submit that a book review is just that—a comment on the world the author has painted, not a woe-is-me about the reviewer’s reading history.

Despite the title, I found this memoir less about face blindness and more about the strength Ms. Sellers gleaned from her survival and her courage to trust her own perceptions.

For a comfortable, relaxing read, find a romance novel. To unearth hard-hitting reality, sink your teeth into You Don’t Look Like Anyone I Know.

Reviewed by Holly Weiss, author of Crestmont show less

This fascinating book is about a woman with the single most dysfunctional family life in history. Heather spent most of her formative years bouncing between the homes of her paranoid schizophrenic mother and her abusive alcoholic father. It's not until she's thirty-eight and married that she begins to wonder about her own neurological problems. Heather can't recognize people. She's kissed strange men in the grocery story because she thought they were her husband. She's walked past her own mother at a gas station without recognizing her. Heather is face-blind. Follow the fascinating and emotional story of Heather's realization of her impairment and her quest to make it known to her friends and colleagues, many of whom simply refuse to show more believe her. show less

If Heather Sellers were a physicist she'd be the Queen of Chaos; but since she's a professor of English maybe she should have the title Abbess of Ambiguity. Her life has been lived in uncertain circumstances. She was raised by a woman she later realizes is paranoid schizophrenic and who brightly discusses her delusions as if they are real and rails against the dangers inherent in sleeping at other people's houses, eating restaurant food, or using the telephone. She attended new schools every year or even more than one a year. Her father, who left the family when she was young, is an irresponsible alcoholic, cross-dressing womanizer who might hit her in the head to emphasize a point, and who invited strangers into the home he shared with show more his unprotected daughter. Neither father nor mother wanted to answer questions about their lives, "If I tell you I'll have to kill you" her father frequently replies. At the age of 30 Sellers starts looking into her family's mental health history because she thinks something genetic could be going on. Both her parents tell her throughout her life that she's not quite right mentally. Her cousin tells her that her aunt didn't leave her house for the last 3 years of her life or her bedroom for the last 1 year; that one family member had to cut a trip to Europe short and return home because of a paranoid episode and that she herself was hospitalized with exhaustion after the birth of her children but she assured Sellers that there was no mental illness in the family. Heather marries an alcoholic libertarian who is divorced from a schizophrenic and refuses to lay down rules for his children because it might give them a complex. This history in itself is enough to set anyone's life careening off into unknown territory.

Added to the uncertainty of her family is Sellers' tendency to get lost in new or newly visited places and her difficulty recognizing people. It takes Sellers 30 years of embarrassment and of having people accuse her of being stuck-up because she ignores them, of kissing the wrong men at parties and being scared when her stepsons confront her in public before she starts searching for a name for her and her mother's difficulties and in a round about way discovers face blindness, prosopagnosia. When she first starts reading about this condition it is described as being very rare, as usually being the result of a stroke or some other trauma to the brain and as effecting only about 100 people in the world. Being a very intelligent person (which is frequently an aspect of prosopagnosia) she does extensive research about the condition and is finally able to find scientists studying the subject who are willing to test her. Viola, she finds she has a severe case. She looks at her husband, closes her eyes and finds she cannot describe either him or herself.

She finds a therapist, certainly a different kind of therapist than the ones she's heard of, because this one gives her advice. He keeps emphasizing that she needs to tell people of her condition. She keeps rejecting that idea. In fact, she decides that what she really needs to do is move to another town, change jobs, be exposed to new people who won't expect her to recognize them.

This is such an excellent book because Sellers is able to describe what it is like to try to understand yourself when you want to be both exactly like and completely different from everyone else. Life is ambiguity and seems to get more ambiguous daily, and Sellers has learned to live with, and even welcome, uncertainty. Oliver Sacks, who also has a genetic form of face blindness, says that the condition effects 2% of the population, Sellers says in some form it effects 1 in 50 people (Jane Goodall has it to a lesser degree). Yet people have to be cajoled into coming out, into letting the rest of the world know of their difficulty. Doesn't that apply to all of us? We want the world to think we're perfect, we're afraid to let others know of our weak spots. Forgiveness is in the subtitle of the book because over the course of her young life, in spite of tremendous difficulties Sellers learns to forgive her very flawed parents, her loving, though almost equally flawed husband, her dismissive stepsons, and herself.

The only problem I have with the book is its cover which shows a busy kind of background with 3 plain faceless cornhusk dolls in the foreground. This is absolutely not what people with face blindness see. The cover should have the dolls dressed in various clothes with different hairstyles and blank faces. The people afflicted notice voice, gait, clothes, and hair - that's the only way they can recognize differences between people. show less

This is exactly the kind of book I like. Dysfunctional family story PLUS an interesting mental-health type twist. It starts with Heather, her boyfriend Dave, and his kids visiting her parents, who are each strange and difficult in different ways. Dave had been married to a woman who had schizophrenia and his descriptions make Heather wonder if that's what's going on with her mother. There are flashbacks describing her mother's weird behavior (nailing all the windows shut & covering them with blankets, carrying a cardboard box of special objects with her everywhere, etc.). Dave's a Libertarian and seems annoying in some ways (never being willing to impose "limits" by stating what he actually wants) but he and Heather stay friends even show more after they divorce.

During her research into schizophrenia she learns about prosopagnosia, face blindness. She's always had trouble recognizing people, to an alarming degree, but didn't realize it was an actual disorder. Her family was so chaotic when she was young that nobody recognized she had problems. By this time she's published stories and is a college English teacher, but she's constantly approaching people she thinks she knows who turn out to be strangers, or "ignoring" people she does know. She gets tested at Harvard and learns she does have this disorder. One of the most interesting parts of the book for me was when she had an MRI as part of this process, and a psychiatrist helps her understand her panic attack as only the lizard brain reacting. He helps her watch the fear and get past it.

Somehow this journey helps her to understand and forgive her mother, or at least to establish boundaries with her. Her mother seems pretty damn impossible. Heather also comes out about face-blindness to the campus community. Some people understand, some don't. She just asks that they keep introducing themselves to her, always.

I liked the way she described her slow acceptance that her mother might have real problems, and that she has this condition that has made life so difficult. It's so often like that - slow realization, not a big change that happens one day. show less

"Prosopagnosia" is a condition that author Heather Sellers has, wherein she is unable to recognize faces. (At first I thought, lucky her! There are faces I'd love to forget!) She isn't diagnosed until her late20s and into her 30s, and so the difficulties she had prior to that she attributed to some sort of 'craziness' on her part. She didn't know what was wrong because it was all she knew. It meant that at times, she didn't recognize family members or friends, even up close. Instead she recognized them by their mannerisms, voice, and the usual location that they appeared coincided with where she expected them to be. A rare disorder, it is thought that the condition can be caused by emotional trauma, but all the facts about it are not show more yet known.

But trauma? It's here. I don't mean to sound flippant, because this is her real life and there's nothing light about it, but there is more trauma in this girl's life than most anyone can imagine. At a few points I was reminded of James Frey's A Million Little Pieces, not because of his dishonesty, but because when I read it, I would think 'this can't get any worse', and then I'd turn the page to find that, indeed, it gets worse. Her early life was lived with her schizophrenic mother who was categorically insane and kept her from ever sleeping more than few hours, but didn't appear to have any medical or psychiatric care, at least not an official diagnosis. Sellers didn't have the advantage of knowing things were messed up, she only suspected it and internalized it. Her father was a cross-dressing drunk, who borrowed her nail polish and who was marginally less crazy than her mother. She rotated between their homes, where food, cleanliness, and basic normalcy was never present.

The book starts with her making a trip to visit her parents, and the madness that ensues when she introduces them to her boyfriend and his sons, all after she's become a successful author. It appears to be the first time she realizes that they are ill, and from there on, she explains how she recognizes that their illnesses likely influenced her own, and how she came to readjust both her thinking about herself and her feelings toward them. It sounds like a lovely ending for such a traumatic beginning. But several factors weren't addressed, and the omissions bothered me.

First, as she comes to her realization that they are very, very sick, she's in her late 20s. A successful writer for magazines, she's also earned a Ph.D. and is a professor working towards tenure. A very smart woman to be sure. Yet how could she achieve all that and remain oblivious to both her own facial blindness and to her parents problems? I wanted to hear more about how she was able to teach and achieve her notable success despite her condition. Details, not just a brief overview.

Another aspect that bothered me was that in decades of looking back, she was able to recount extensive dialogues of past conversations. So much so that it doesn't ring true. Is her memory heightened by the neurological condition she has, as a blind person often has sharper hearing than others? An explanation would have been helpful. At one point, she relates when a man at a reading questioned her about the believability of her autobiographical writing, and while she admits to being uncomfortable with the question (she says in the book), she related to the man something that another author had said, that "when we wrote fiction, some kind of automatic story generated itself, based on what we knew about what we saw." She never gave him a direct answer, and in this book she doesn't say directly what she meant, but it left an opening that wasn't answered...how much of this can be said to be accurate? So much of the traumatic events she recalls deal with big things, yet she never explains how she coped with being left alone in a dark trailer in the woods with strangers banging on the door. Explaining that she was frightened doesn't go far enough...what exactly did she do about it? While she discusses missing school due to her parents instability, she never relates how she got through a school day. How did she relate to her classmates? What did she eat? How did she do her homework? The extreme details recounted about her parents, some really over-the-top accounts, doesn't mesh with the very few details she reveals about her own survival.

Finally, the significant omission of any details from her brother leaves an empty hole in the history. She acknowledges that for his privacy she'll let him decide if he wishes to tell his story. I appreciate her candor in that and her respect for his feelings, but in all of her detailed accounts, one wonders where he is during all of this. Hearing how they related to each other during all this madness would have fleshed out the story even more.

It's an amazing story that leaves many unanswered questions. What she has achieved despite tremendous obstacles can't be minimized. It would have been helpful to have had perhaps more details about herself and less about her parental extremes, as the shock value actually made it feel so implausible.

(ARC rec'd by publisher for review: acceptance of which doesn't influence contents of review.) show less

Heather Sellers has face blindness, a disorder that makes it next-to-impossible to identify people by their facial features. Remarkably, she's in her late thirties before she discovers that she sees people differently - her coping mechanisms have allowed her to get by for years. It's pure luck that she discovers the existence of prosopagnosia while researching her symptoms. Then it takes persistence on her part to find a doctor who believes her. At the same time, Heather's life is in turmoil as she's preparing to marry and introduce her fiance and his family to her clan. Heather grew up in an unorthodox (at best) household with a potentially schizophrenic mother and an equally crazy (narcissistic? borderline personality disordered?) show more father. As Heather struggles to understand her illness she's also learning to understand those around her - and working to learn how to build healthier relationships.

You Don't Look Like Anyone I Know is a remarkable story about a remarkable woman. Heather is surprisingly well-adjusted considering the obstacles she's had to overcome to become the successful woman she is. At the same time, she'd probably deny that her road has been more difficult than her peers. To me, it's more proof that people are more resilient than we imagine possible. Who needs the exaggerated fantasies of James Frey - real life is strange and miraculous enough! show less

Heather Sellers suffers from a rare neurological disorder called prosopagnosia or face blindness. She can’t recognize people by their faces. She wasn’t diagnosed until she was in her thirties – growing up she knew something was wrong with her but assumed she had some kind of mental illness. Adding to the confusion she experienced growing up was the fact that her mother was a paranoid schizophrenic and her father was an alcoholic who wore women’s underwear.

This book is a fascinating memoir. Heather does an excellent job of explaining her disorder in laymen’s terms and conveying the confusion she experiences on an everyday basis. Also, she describes her unusual parents so vividly, I felt like I could see and hear them. She does show more a great job of capturing her mother’s fluctuating moods in the manner in which her mother speaks.

I’ve always been fascinated with how the brain works and mental illness. This memoir is not only the story of Heather and her quest to make sense of her world but also a great character study of her parents, especially her mother. I found myself thinking about this book a lot and talking about it with other people more than I usually do with books I’m reading. I think it would make a great book club selection – there are so many facets of Heather’s life that would be great discussion points.

This is one of the best memoirs I’ve read, right up there with The Glass Castle. I highly recommend You Don’t Look like Anyone I Know. show less