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

by Heather Sellers

An unusual and uncommonly moving family memoir, with a twist that give new meaning to hindsight, insight, and forgiveness.

Heather Sellers is face-blind-that is, she has prosopagnosia, a rare neurological condition that prevents her from reliably recognizing people's faces. Growing up, unaware of the reason for her perpetual confusion and anxiety, she took what cues she could from speech, hairstyle, and gait. But she sometimes kissed a stranger, thinking he was her boyfriend, or failed to recognize even her own father and mother. She feared she must be crazy.

Yet it was her mother who nailed windows shut and covered them with blankets, made her daughter walk on her knees to spare the carpeting, had her practice secret words to use in the likely event of abduction. Her father went on weeklong "fishing trips" (aka benders), took in drifters, wore panty hose and bras under his regular clothes. Heather clung to a barely coherent story of a "normal" childhood in order to survive the one she had.

That fairy tale unraveled two decades later when Heather took the man she would marry home to meet her parents and began to discover the truth about her family and about herself. As she came at last to trust her own perceptions, she learned the gift of that embracing the past as it is allows us to let it go. And she illuminated a deeper truth-that even in the most flawed circumstances, love may be seen and felt.

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Genres: Memoir, Nonfiction, Psychology, Biography Memoir, Biography, Audiobook, Science

368 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1, 2010

About the author

Heather Sellers has a PhD in English/Creative Writing from Florida State University. She’s a professor of English at Hope College in Holland, Michigan, where she teaches poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction writing courses. She won an NEA grant for fiction and her first book of fiction, Georgia Under Water, was part of the Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers program.

Reviews

[Petra X · Rating 4 out of 5]

Update Dec. 2020 in this plague year of masks I am seeing that some people find it hard to recognise others when they have a mask on, but others have no difficulty at all. More and more people are on the sliding scale of face recognition. I knew it wasn't just me, but I hadn't realised there were so many of us. One firm with a lot of employees has masks printed with a photo of the lower half of the person's face which is either an interesting solution or a fun gimmick! I wonder if anyone here has experienced the problem of not recognising people so easily with a mask?
____________________

The first two thirds of this book were the author using the reader as a therapist and just letting out one long blast of hatred towards her family for being so appalling. Or at least that's the way she tells it. There was absolutely nothing to do with prosopagnosia even vaguely hinted at.

The last third of the book was about prosopagnosia. Sellers sets herself up as an expert and authority on this neurological disorder that she and I share. Having read Prosopagnosia, Face Blindness Explained. Prosopagnosia Types, Tests, Symptoms, Causes, Treatment, Research and Face Recognition all covered, I don't share her confidence. The author says she can't recognise people often, but then reading carefully it seems she can recognise people very often but not reliably, which is what I have.

I've had lunch with someone I see at least three times a week and thought I recognised them later in the supermarket but wasn't sure. However I recognised their handbag (I gave it to her) so that was ok. Facial recognition is by a part of the brain that is discrete, that is all other kinds of recognition are not handled by that area.

For the few people I have met who know they are face blind to some degree, there are various other problems, some of which are to do with interpreting facial expressions which look as though the person has Aspergers, but in fact they don't. Not all of the things we share are negative, all of us are somewhat intellectual and most of us are artistic as well. This leads me to believe that mild prosopagnosia may just be yet another neurotype, a different kind of wiring, personality really, that is less common that the average one, but not rare, one that people are generally unaware of and just say, "I'm never any good at remembering faces".

One thing that changed for me was that I decided to be open, to 'come out' as it were and tell everyone, so that people would stop thinking I was sometimeish or cutting style on them by not speaking to them. However, half the people laugh and say they don't believe it and the other half look at me like I'm mad and they don't believe it either. The only people who do believe it are people who know me well and are forever prodding me when they see someone I know and if I don't recognise them will tell me their name first. So all I'm doing by telling people I'm face blind is making myself look even more eccentric. What to do?

The book wasn't a hard read and it was well-written but really reading about other people's dysfunctional families can be extremely boring. Tolstoy's opening lines of Anna Karenina, “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way," might well be true, but it doesn't make them interesting. The book started off as a 2, degenerated rapidly to a 1 and redeemed itself ending up on a good, golden, solid five!

[Petra X · Rating 4 out of 5]

Prosopagnosia is supposed to be a rare neurological condition. But it isn't. And I'm not even sure it is a 'condition' and not just part of a personality type.

Recognising faces is on a continuum from extreme non-recognition to the super-recognisers employed by, for instance, the police on Oxford St. in London to catch shoplifters. I am well below the average, you could say I have prosopagnosia.

I've read in a friend's review that she can't believe someone could go through all their life and not know that they can't recognise people. But you can, just not always and not the same people. You think you have a bad memory for faces and you tell people that and then they tell you almost always how they can't remember names (can anyone?)

When I tell my customers I might not recognise them again (as I have the last few years since I found out about prosopagnosia since I hope people will then not be quite rude to me as they think that is what I am being to them) and talk about it, about once a month or so one will tell me of their exact same problem. I have noticed that it goes along with an introvert/extrovert (no balance) personality, not being able to read people well, being artistic, intelligent and too blunt.

We don't all share all of these characteristics, but it does seem the people I know do share most of these. Perhaps we don't have neurological deficits as much as we share a personality type that is 'diagnosed' instead of accepted as another variety of normal? It's not as if we live any differently. We find it harder to make friends for sure, but we aren't friendless, we have careers, we marry, we have children. We just don't always know who you are even if we did a few hours earlier.

All of the people I have met who have prosopagnosia say, as I do, that it comes and goes. That is part of the problem. You don't know who you aren't going to recognise next. I've left my ex-husband at the airport, but never any other time did I not recognise him. My friend I lunch with a few times a week I've failed to recognise later in the day. This makes people think you are cutting style on them, that you are sometimeish and snobbish and only speak if you feel like it. But you don't know to say hello because you don't know you knew them.

I lost one very good customer, a very wealthy man (best friend is the Aga Khan, seriously). He would turn up every six months or so and buy hundreds of dollars worth of books. I didn't say hello to him the last time he was in and he didn't believe a word I said and was very nasty to me and told me he would never ever buy another book from me. He hasn't either.

So I'm interested to read this book from the prosopagnosia point of view. From the disfunctional family angle? Not so much, I had my own and like dreams, hearing about other people's abusive family can be a little tedious.

[Stephanie *Eff your feelings* · Rating 3 out of 5]

Prosopagnosia, or face blindness, is a condition that prevents people who have it from remembering faces. They can see faces and the individual features just fine.....but they just can't recall them.

The first time I heard of this was on an episode of Radiolab and was astounded to learn one of my favorite artists, Chuck Close, who is known for his larger than life size PORTRAITS, is profoundly face blind.

What??

I am no where near Chuck's level, but I am a portrait artist and I just couldn't wrap my head around this. How in the hell can he paint these amazing faces and not even recognize the people in the paintings? He explained that he treated the face like a landscape. If the person were to turn their head a little, it's a whole new face to him.

So, when I came across this book I was very excited.

Heather writes about her life growing up not knowing she has face blindness. She just thinks she's crazy. Her mom is undiagnosed schizophrenic and her dad is an alcoholic cross dresser. Her life is a bit chaotic to say the least.

It isn't until she is well into adulthood before she finds out that what her problem is Prosopagnosia. It is very hard for me to believe that a person could go through life without figuring out that "hey, I don't remember peoples faces". But this was the case for Heather. That's just nuts.

You Don't Look Like Anyone I Know is an interesting book, a good book worth a read, but I wasn't a huge fan of the writing style.

Another famous face blind person....Kurt Vonnegut

[Laura · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don't know if this is really a 5 star book as far as the writing goes, but reading it was like getting religion. People really can't understand what I'm talking about when I tell them that I don't recognize faces (though Sellers' wording is even better - I don't RELIABLY recognize faces), so it is wonderful to read from someone who understands.

Our backgrounds couldn't be more different, but our prosopagnostic experiences are almost eerily similar. For example, when you tell someone you can't recognize faces, they INEVITABLY tell you how bad THEY are at names. I would give anything to just be bad at names. If my mother showed up somewhere I didn't expect her to with a slightly different hairstyle or glasses on... I would NOT recognize her.

Sellers is excellent at being both humorous and philosophical about this sometimes terrifying condition. I laughed a lot and almost cried (when I realized that I can't picture my son's face in my head). Her conclusion was that if there were a pill to cure prosopagnosia, she would not take it. That the uncertainty inherent to the condition led her to become the kind of person that she is - someone who deals well with uncertainty, doubt, and the need to be creative. I would take the pill in a second. Not to be terrified to walk into a room of people I may know but won't recognize - that would be priceless. But maybe, having read this book, I will be able to look for the good in the glitch within my brain.

[Leigh Hancock · Rating 5 out of 5]

The amazing thing about Heather Sellers is not that she has prosopagnosia, i.e.,face blindness, but rather that it took her almost four decades to realize the fact. Not that anything else in her childhood was normal: her mother was a schizophrenic who made her children walk around their apartment on their knees (try it--it's kinda fun for about 3 minutes) and her alcoholic father dyed his hair "into a frizzy golden Afro" and banged on the table, yelling, "Classified! Classified!" when asked a question he didn't want to answer. With parents like these, maybe we'd all have prosopagnosia.

Sellars tells it all with compassion, without pity. And she does a wonderful job of creating strange, quirky, utterly human scenes. She flings her arms around her fiance when he comes to greet her at the airport--only to realize she's hugged the wrong guy. She miraculously escapes to college where she cowers for twelve years, somehow emerging with a PhD. She takes her boyfriend and his teenage sons to meet her father, who rolls out in a wheelchair looking like "a pile of pieces of a man." And she survives an MRI feeling "molecularly altered"--which, given her history, might not be such a bad idea.

I read this book twice without stopping. I loved it.

[Cheryl · Rating 3 out of 5]

*3.5 stars*

Imagine your friend, significant other, or family member. Now imagine not being able to recognize that person if they're in the middle of a group, or on the street. This is the face blindness (or prosopagnosia) that Heather Sellers deals with daily. It is a rare neurological condition that makes face recognition unreliable. She could walk up to someone who was not her friend, or look right at her friend and walk on by. Unbelievable right?

It seems hard to understand until you read this memoir. Or until she is a lecturer at a seminar you attend and you see it played out in real life, when you see her in the elevator and have to say your name again before continuing a conversation you had earlier.

The book starts with Sellers as a teacher, stepmother, fiancee who is on her way to introduce her new family to her parents. Along the way, you discover that her parents are similar to the ones in The Glass Castle, except that they're not homeless, and the mother is similar to the one in The Memory Palace. A family at odds, a father who was an alcoholic and cross-dresser, "Under his ostrich boots, my father wore panty hose. He had taken my brand-new Sally Hansen Sweet Roses nail polish;"and a mother who had paranoid schizophrenia, "Walk, she said, on your knees, in order to protect the carpeting."

The inspiration is that despite a tough, reclusive childhood, Sellers manages to attend college, get a master's and P.H.D. and is really a FANTASTIC lecturer. Her energy is contagious and she really knows how to deliver the craft in astounding ways, "My work as a teacher of creative writing was to lead students to strange their thinking."

Interwoven in all this is the story of coming to terms with prosopagnosia, being scorned by friends who deemed her a snob, feeling as if telling people would make them think she was mentally unstable. The chapters veer back and forth between childhood and adulthood, between father, mother and daughter. Sometimes confusing, sometimes too informative and sometimes surprising you (in a good way) with honest emotion.

I'm not sure how many books are out there on prosopagnosia, but this is certainly one that give you ALL the information you would need to know about it. Who knows, you probably know someone who has it. If you do, keep this in mind: ALWAYS reintroduce yourself.

[Susan (aka Just My Op) · Rating 4 out of 5]

“My gosh in heaven,” Heather Sellers has a strange family.

Prosopagnosia is an inability to recognize people by their faces, perhaps not as rare as once thought. The author struggled with the disorder long before she knew that such a thing even existed, certainly before she knew that she had the disorder. Coming from a highly dysfunctional family with a (denied) history of mental illness, Heather Sellers thought that maybe she was just crazy.

Her memoir is heartfelt, informative, and interesting. A bit of it falls into the “my family is crazier than your family” genre, and I must say, her family is right up there with the best of them. Heather is a teacher who can't recognize her students, who insults faculty members by not recognizing them when she talked to them just five minutes before. She falls in love with a kind Libertarian, not the type of person she ever expected to love, and has a very unconventional marriage. She tries to understand and make peace with her parents even though their own problems will prevent her from ever having a smooth relationship.

Ms. Sellers mentions having a brother a few times in the book but the reader is not told any more about him, there is almost nothing of her relationship with him. This is explained in the Afterward section, and I understand and respect her reasons for leaving him out. Still, while I was reading the story, I kept wondering where he was, how he was reacting.

Perhaps because I had heard of this disorder before I read the book, although I didn't know very much about it, it seemed so illogical to me that the author resisted so hard against telling anyone about it. It seemed to me that it would be easier to tell a friend that you don't recognize faces, even your good friends, even your husband's and stepchildren's faces, than to let a friend go away thinking you have intentionally betrayed or snubbed her. But that is easy for me to say. With a real fear that she might be mentally ill, the author pretended that nothing was wrong and avoided situations where she was likely to not know people she should recognize.

By the way, I recognize people's dogs a lot more easily than I recognize the faces on the tall end of the leashes. I don't think that is as much prosopagnosia as it is just not paying attention. What can I say? I really like dogs.

I was given an Advanced Readers' Edition of this book by the publisher, for which I am grateful.

[Tara Chevrestt · Rating 2 out of 5]

I just didn't like this much at all. I thought it was about a woman with prosopagnosia (face blindness) and her discovering her illness and dealing with it. Only about a quarter of the memoir is about her and her face blindness. The rest of it is all about her extremely nutty mother, very nutty father, and even her married family is kind of nutty. Her husband is attracked to nutty women and her stepson behaves very strangely at Disney World and refuses to bathe till he smells like a fish.

Even the author came across as nutty to me. I get that her childhood was rough. She had a paranoid schizophrenic mother that carried a box with her at all times and nailed all her windows shut among other things and her father was an alcoholic cross dresser and the system never picked up on this family? I found myself questioning just how much is memoir and how much is exagerrated. Are there really families this bad?? WOW. Nevertheless, what was with the eating of paper?

When I first seen this book on Shelf Awareness, someone had used the term funny to describe it.. I didn't laugh once.

However, I think most people will probably like this. The Glass Castle was a HUGE hit and from my understanding, that was a depressing memoir about a dysfunctional family, so maybe this one will be too.

It may be for you, but it wasn't for me. Thanks to my friend Susan for sharing it with me tho.

[Ciara · Rating 2 out of 5]

i honestly didn't know how to rate this book. on a more charitable day, i might have given it a four. i have read heather's books about writing, & while they are practically identical to natalie goldberg's hippie-dippy new age school of writing instruction, they were okay. her writing style itself didn't really appeal to me, but i wouldn't say it's bad.

i kind of think her loosey-goosey free associative style worked better in this memoir than it does in her writing guides. but it still wasn't my fave. this book is billed as a memoir of a woman coming to terms with a diagnosis of face blindness. she has some kind of neurological malfunction that makes her unable to recognize faces--even those of her family & closest friends. she muddles along, recognizing people by their haircuts or clothing or mannerisms. it's an interesting condition & it seems like it would cause a lot of complications in a person's everyday life. somehow heather fails to realize she has any condition at all until she is nearly forty.

the gears for her diagnosis are set into motion when she brings her new boyfriend & his two tweenage sons to florida to meet her parents. the visits don't go well at all. her mother is obviously mentally ill & her father is a non-functioning alcoholic. somehow heather convinces herself that this will be a really fun trip for the boys & that she, her parents, her partner, & his sons will have a merry old time playing cards & eating dinner. when she sees her parents through the eyes of her partner & his kids, she realizes how wrong she is. then an ex-boyfriend at her high school reunion inquires after her paranoid schizophrenic mother & heather loses her shit.

i mean, seriously. it never occurred to her that her mother might be mentally ill? i started wondering that about my mom when i was like nine years old. & if anyone else ever suggested it to me, it was no reason to run screaming into the wilderness. sometimes people have mental health problems. it doesn't make them bad people. it doesn't make me a bad person if one of my parents happens to have mental health issues. think about all the people in the world that have mental health issues, & how many of those people have children. yeah, a parent being crazy can affect a child (it certainly affected me), but it's not a death sentence. jesus.

anyway, heather starts obsessively researching paranoid schizophrenia. & somehow this leads her to the idea of face blindness. she begins to wonder if her face blindness was caused by her mother's inability to bond with her as an infant. she is just speculating that her mother was unable to bond with her, based on the idea that many schizophrenic people find it difficult to look at people's faces--even the faces of children & babies. heather thinks maybe her mom didn't look at her, so her brain never developed the neurological routing necessary to identify faces. interesting theory, i guess? but she follows this up (over & over & over) with how she doesn't blame her mother for her face blindness. she thinks that maybe this is just a connection they have.

she goes to doctor after doctor, trying to pin down a diagnosis for herself, & all her doctors fucking suck & insist that she's fine. um, find a new doctor, one who is less likely to say, "i've never diagnosed this extremely rare condition before, so i'm not going to diagnose it in you." finally she learns about a harvard lab that specifically studies face blindness, & she goes there & gets a diagnosis. she also shares her schizophrenia-connection theories with them, but they are nonplussed.

& blah blah blah, right? this book reads like someone just got a diagnosis of some extremely weird & rare condition & they are trying to make sense of it for themselves. which is to say, it reads like a diary, kind of. & that is really not that much fun to read. heather is also beginning to cope with the fact that she had a very dysfunctional upbringing. listen, sister. so did i. so did a lot of people. i'm not saying it's not worth talking about, but i am saying it's not that interesting. the people that can relate are like, "uh huh, right, me too, who cares," & the people that can't relate are like, "please, no one's family is this wackadoodle." it's kind of a lose/lose, unless you are doing it really well, which heather does not.

[K · Rating 1 out of 5]

I got about a quarter of the way through this book before deciding that I just couldn't do it any more. Heather Sellers, who suffers prosopagnosia (inability to recognize faces), grew up in a family that makes jeanette walls's look merely eccentric. Not being a fan of The Glass Castle, I found the dysfunction here even more difficult to stomach (mother seems to have been an undiagnosed paranoid schizophrenic; father was an alcoholic cross-dresser; Heather bounced back and forth between their two houses and did not receive anything resembling normal parenting from either of them). It's terribly sad (assuming it's not exaggerated, which is always a question in today's age of memoir skepticism), and pretty awful to read about.

In addition to being a heavy and depressing experience, though, this book was just plain confusing. For starters, the writing was disjointed -- surprisingly uneven and disorganized for a writing professor. Many detailed anecdotes (Heather and her stepsons at the beach, for instance) were told in excruciating detail for no apparent reason -- they didn't add to the story. Additionally, although Heather mentions a brother, the story is told as if she grew up alone. A perusal of other goodreads reviews told me she was apparently protecting her brother's privacy by not writing about him which is certainly legitimate, but it was a bit weird to have him there yet not there. Even more confusing, though, was the length of time it seemed to take Heather to realize that her parents were not the type you can easily introduce to your prospective husband and stepsons. For an adult woman who's obviously intelligent and successful to build up her stepsons' expectations by describing her unfortunate mother as thrilled to become a grandmother seemed a bizarre choice. I hate to sound judgmental, but how far can denial go already?

I was hoping for more on the prosopagnosia, but found it difficult to get through this yet-another-top-this-one!-dysfunctional-childhood memoir in order to get there. And from the goodreads reviews I read, the prosopagnosia is a more peripheral part of the book in any case. I'd probably be better off reading Oliver Sacks. So off this one goes to the growing "couldn't finish" pile.

[Julie · Rating 2 out of 5]

I thought the premise of this memoir sounded interesting, like it would be a blend of the dysfunctional family of Jeannette Walls’s The Glass Castle and the author’s account of her strange neurological disorder like Daniel Tammet’s Born on a Blue Day. However, it completely lacked the humor of Walls and the insightfulness of Tammet. Right away I felt I was thrust into the middle of Seller’s own self-pity party. She overanalyzes everything from her relationship to her fiancé turned husband and his sons, her mother’s possible paranoid schizophrenia and her own inability to foster social relationships due to her face blindness. She constantly justifies her parents’ erratic behavior, not wanting to place blame on anyone other than herself due to her oppressive need to please everyone. I was more interested in the second half of the book when she actually seeks help because I wanted to see her make progress in her life. Her initial self-deprecation was too tedious and depressing. Her insecurity and indecisiveness affects every part of her life, especially her marriage. She doesn’t seem to have her own distinct opinions, though when she mentions that her husband is a libertarian, she acts as though she just uttered a four-letter word.

What really upset me about this book though, was the writing. How can someone with a PhD in writing, who teaches writing, and who’s written books on writing be such an ineloquent writer? I was not impressed or engaged with Seller’s disjointed thoughts and lack of structure, as she bounces around her own narrative, reflecting on her childhood one minute, then analyzing her current situation the next. She mentions that she has a brother, and a sibling relationship must have had some impact on her upbringing, but she only mentions his existence in passing, and it’s difficult to determine if he really meant that little to her or if she was protecting his privacy. There were just too many flaws to elicit any strong emotions in me while I was reading. While writing about her life may have been therapeutic to Sellers, I don’t think it was written well enough to engage readers.

I received a complimentary copy of this book from Goodreads First Reads program.

[Amy · Rating 2 out of 5]

"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 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.)

[Nicole Harkin · Rating 5 out of 5]

WOW! Ok, this book will blow your mind. Mrs. Sellers is face blind. That means that she cannot recognize people by their face. No, it’s not that she has problems remembering names. That is not the problem. In fact she is good at remembering names. She can’t remember faces. This is a problem only 100 people have. She is one of them. Her mom is schizophrenic and she has some other issues too, but, the lead as the say, is that she is face blind.

We have all met people like this I bet. I have a woman I see ALL of the time in my office. I say hi to her when I see her. I wave. Nothing. She does not react. She scurries away. Well, maybe she just does not who I am? (Apparently some people are voice blind too. Who knew?)

I loved the part when her shrink told her to stop telling herself the same story! That’s right readers, other people hide behind their stories too.

My friend Erin just posted on her website, when a co-worker told her to get over the fact that she did not want to work on the project she had been given with an asshole boss (my words, not hers), that a lot of people seem to be scared to change their situation. I think this is true. We are brain washed into thinking we can’t change our lives. Not true.

So back to the book review: Mrs. Sellers changes her situation. She takes control. She stops running from her problems, as we are there with her right along the way.

My only criticism is that I want to know more. I want to know how she is today? What happened with her husband? Did her parents read the book? And why doesn’t she mention her brother?

The book comes out in October, but if you want to get it early, I will mail it to you!

[Sila]

Prosop-agnosia: face agnostic, face doubter. When I read the inside cover and heard this word the first time, I didn't think I would be able to spell it myself. After reading Heather Sellers's story though, I became quite acquainted with both the word and what it really means. I think she does a great job of explaining this hard-to-describe face recognition problem. I'm sure reading her struggles would help people in similar conditions. She starts telling her story from when she was a kid in a highly dysfunctional family. She doesn't exactly call her family dysfunctional though, which I felt is because she is telling the story from the eyes of the little girl who thought it was a normal life.
Her writing style sometimes leaves the reader hanging, waiting for more to come, but to no avail. I actually respected the author wanting to keep some parts to herself. And the main point of the book is to teach people about this extremely rare condition called prosopagnosia which is successfully carried out.

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book reminded me of The Glass Castle, in that Heather Sellers endured a childhood with dysfunctional parents attempting to raise her. Like the Glass Castle, I was surprised & impressed by her ability to express her love (numerous times) for her parents. In some ways, I wanted & expected her to resent her family, because that's how disgusted I felt about her parent's behavior. Disgusted!

While the core of this book was sad & depressing, I think it has to be in order to convey the suffering that Heather experienced growing up & then beginning her own journey in discovering her illness.

After getting a grip on her illness, the book rapidly concludes with her sharing her diagnosis with the world & her expressing how liberating that was for her. That portion of the book seemed a little rushed to me, but I'm glad she included comments about how she finally felt in control of her life after sharing her news with others. That is one of the many inspirations of the book, in my opinion.

[Nick · Rating 3 out of 5]

The beginning was very depressing. My heart aches to think there are kids living with parents like this right now. I also feel bad Heather had to live w face blindness for so long before she knew she has a real issue. Overall, it has made me think differently about people in general. Never knowing the way people really are behind closed doors.

[Elyse Walters · Rating 3 out of 5]

I had read another 'mystery-fiction' book about Face Blindness (Prosopagnosia), called "Everything but the Face" by Goodreads member, JC Marino and loved it. ---

so I was interested in reading more (this NON-FICTION story). Such a rare condition. The author wrote her story 'true-from her heart'!

I understand a movie might be made on this topic?

[Deb · Rating 4 out of 5]

I picked up this book because I have trouble recognizing people, particularly when they are "out of context". I work on a college campus and many times someone will greet me by name and they look familiar to me but I don't know who they are. It's worse when someone I know from one place, like work, greets me in another place, like a store. I believe that everyone everywhere should wear name tags all the time.

But, as it turns out, I am not face blind like the author of this memoir. Thank goodness! I am embarrassed enough with my poor memory for names and faces without being totally unable to remember what people look like. Heather Sellers can't distinguish her own husband and stepchildren from other people in the room, unless there is another clue, like a haircut, what color they're wearing, or how they walk. It is surprising to find out how difficult it was for her to discover that she had a problem, and then to find a diagnosis. Even when she found the diagnosis, doctors told her that she couldn't have face blindness because it was very rare. Well, the doctors were wrong. It may be rare, but that's probably because people don't get diagnosed properly.

In telling the story of her condition, the author also tells the story of her incredibly dysfunctional family (mother un-diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic, father alcoholic). It's amazing she got out in one piece and finished her education, under the circumstances.

I think this was a really interesting book and I am glad that the author shared her story.

"I skimmed along until two words brought me to a complete standstill: face recognition.
I put my fingers on the words and closed the book over my hand. I closed my eyes. The book was talking about emotions on faces, but the phrase itself, face recognition, made it easy to conflate the two concepts: reading emotion and identifying faces. It was as if I'd shaken a kaleidoscope. It was the same pieces, but suddenly a long sequence of misunderstandings, from when I was very young to just the night before, sprang into light, lined up, crystallized.
It was as though all along I had been someone else, and now I had a glimpse of who was who." p. 109

[Laurie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reading about Heather Sellers childhood is like reading an account of time spent in a war zone; her mother is an untreated (and undiagnosed) paranoid schizophrenic who makes everyone walk on their knees to protect the carpet, nails the windows shut and is convinced that the TV takes in information about them and her father is a raging alcoholic who never seems to think about anyone but himself. Sellers bounces back and forth between the two, trying to look normal at school and all the while thinking that she herself has a mental illness. She’s in her late 30s before she discovers that her own problem is called prosopagnosia, a neurological problem that causes one to be unable to recognize faces, even those of close friends and family- even, for that matter, oneself in a photo.

Despite her horrific upbringing, the author is very successful in her professional life. She attends college, gets her PhD, writes a collection of short stories and is a professor at a Michigan college. Her personal life, though, is less successful. She loses friends because they think she is snubbing them when in reality, she just does not recognize them unless she meets them in a space where she is expecting them to be, they have not changed their hair, and are dressed in a style that is usual for them. She, an NPR listening left winger, is engaged to, married to and then divorced from without ever having lived with an alcoholic Libertarian.

She self diagnoses herself and then is tested at Harvard, proving that she is correct. Validated, she finds that she is all right with who she is. For the first time in her life, she knows that she is not mentally ill. After hard pushing by her therapist, Sellers comes out to people. It’s a hard sell; people don’t already know about face blindness and so they don’t know how to react. Some people ignore it; some people deny it; some people have lots of questions. But it’s all okay; Sellers is okay. She finally knows who she is. She’s a survivor. It’s an amazing story.

[Jourdan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don't even know where to begin. I feel like I'd have to read this book three more times to even start understanding all that it contains. Mental illness, relationships, science, love, overcoming childhood-- these are just a few of the main topics covered by Heather Sellers in this incredibly rich and often disturbing memoir.

I'd heard of prosopagnosia (face blindness) before; a college roommate as well as another friend had both (suffered from? dealt with?) it, and I was familiar enough with it that I was surprised to read about what a difficult time she had recognizing it and then convincing others that she had it once she figured it out. I was also fascinated by the generous amount of detail and research she supplied; it was so interesting to learn about it from someone who could explain it in layman's terms as well as who could offer a personal perspective.

She also talks (almost always) heartbreakingly about her relationships with others, namely her parents and her fiancé, and how her prosopagnosia both affected and was related to the difficulties in those relationships. I was also surprised at how difficult it was for her to tell others about her condition, and how many of her peers felt the same way. It had a much greater effect on their personal lives than I might have guessed. It also gave me insight in dealing with my friends who deal with this, and also makes me wonder how many others I know who might have it-- I hope that they would be open about it so that we (their friends) could learn how to most appropriately help them in potentially difficult situations.

I'd definitely recommend this book, but it's not an easy read. The emotions are heavy, and there is no shortage of difficult moments. She mentions in the epilogue that she had originally written a book of memoirs, but her editor told her that no one would ever believe that anyone could survive that childhood-- it's tough for me, to be honest, as someone who came from a loving family, to believe what she writes. I mean, I do. But it's hard to think of a kid going through what she did.

[Tim Lowe · Rating 5 out of 5]

When you read as many books as most book bloggers do, it is a real pleasure when one exceeds expectations and knocks your socks off....

I just finished Heather Sellers' book YOU DON'T LOOK LIKE ANYONE I KNOW: A True Story of Family, Face Blindness and Forgiveness (Riverhead Books/Penguin) and I am sockless. My expectation going in was that it would be a nice, informational memoir that would explain face blindness in a little more detail. What I got was an amazingly personal, honest and unforgettable story of a woman who has endured a lifetime of uncertainty.

Can you imagine not being able to recognize anyone by their face? Not even your own parents, husband or best friends? Heather Sellers has a rare neurological condition called prosopagnosia, or face blindness. Not even her doctors believed her at first when she claimed the affliction.

(Note to memoirists: If you want to know how to connect with your readers and move along a story with great pace and fullness, read this book.)

No fiction author could have made this story believable. If you think your family is strange, then you need to meet Heather Sellers' family. I do not want to ruin one page of this book for you by divulging any details about what transpires between the covers; suffice to say that I am amazed at what a sweet and amazing woman resulted from this turmoil. The real victory of this book is that you are pulling for Heather all through it, even when she misbehaves.

I haven't been moved by a book like this in a long time. If you enjoy memoirs, you are cheating yourself if you don't give this one a spin.

--Review originally posed at http://bookspin.blogspot.com

[Jamie Dacyczyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Listened to this on audio.

Fascinating memoir about one woman's journey to realize that she has a disorder known as "face blindness", which is the inability to recognize people by their faces. She remembers their names, and she can figure out who someone is based on the context (like the man wearing her husband's jacket and washing the dishes in their kitchen is her husband), but out of context she cannot recognize them without other clues. Very interesting, and definitely a unique perspective to have this explained in her own words.

The book also discusses her mother's mental illness and her father's alcoholism (and possibly other mental illness), and how these may or may not have contributed to the author's face blindness and and the fact that it took her so long to realize that there was a specific problem going on. She also discusses her relationship with her husband quite a bit, since their relationship was off-and-on as she struggled to figure out what exactly was wrong with her brain.

I don't read a lot of non-fiction or memoirs, so I don't have a very good base line for character development or plot or whatever when it comes to non-fiction...so I can't really comment too much on those aspects. It felt well written, and didn't feel like it dragged anywhere or was too wordy.

[Thomas Edmund · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wasn't quite sure what to expect from this piece, and I confess that upon beginning I thought the same thing that Seller's questioner did: "How can this be true? Its far too raw."

Yet there is something undeniably real about Seller's memoir. For a work that is so totally comsumed by disease the two main focuses are whether the mother has schizohprenia, then the whole 'face-blindness' thing, there is a strong feeling of uplift, and dark humourous side than propel one through this book.

The story jumps around in time a bit, essentially covering the 'now' side of things where Seller discusses her marriage breakdown and investigation into prosopagnosia, and a recounting of significant events from her upbringing.

Somehow Seller's manages to capture the worst of such a family situation, a drunken cross-dressing father, and a schizophrenic mother, and yet also communicate the human-ness of it all and the ambivalence of feelings that come with the territory.

There are some truly tear-jerking moments of this tale, and I caution that it may be a difficult read for some, but I highly recommend Seller's seminal work.

[Kelly · Rating 3 out of 5]

The disorder and the telling of Sellers' story is very interesting. The story moved along quickly and covered a lot of (but not too much) the author's life.

I gave it three stars because I didn't like the narrator at all. If you are going to read this book, read the physical book.

[Holly Weiss · Rating 3 out of 5]

Rollercoaster Read Requires Realistic Review
(3 1/2 stars)

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 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

[Dianne · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is Heather Sellers' true story of growing up with prosopagnosia, or face blindness, a rare neurological condition that keeps her from recognizing faces. It's a difficult condition to explain to people because it isn't consistent; she may or may not recognize a face at any given time. She knew growing up that something was wrong, but didn't get an actual diagnosis until well into adulthood.

She describes it as taking a handful of stones, naming them, throwing them back among the thousands of other stones on a beach and trying to pick them out again. We'd never be able to distinguish one from the other. She says: "For face-blind people, a given human face looks more or less like all other human faces. They aren't able to recognize fine distinctions in mouths, noses, cheekbones, eyes. The special processor, the face processor, isn't installed."

She wondered all her life if she was mentally ill but finally got a true diagnosis when she contacted researchers at Harvard and was invited to take part in trials. MRI scans of her brain while doing recognition exercises showed the areas of her brain that weren't functioning normally and resulted in the prosopagnosia diagnosis.

Since learning the truth about her condition she's done television interviews, met others with the same illness and written this book to help other sufferers. In the afterword she says: "I hope that, at least in some small way, this story will help steer others toward clarity, and toward love, in spite of the greatest odds."

Even without the aspect of face blindness Ms. Sellers' story is quite remarkable. She spent her teen years moving back and forth between her separated parents, her father an alcoholic and her mother a paranoid schizophrenic. It's a wonder she survived at all; it's amazing that she grew up, got an eduction and is now a successful university professor and authour. It's also refreshing that, in this day of blaming our parents for everything, she isn't angry or resentful toward hers, but loves them and is grateful for having them.

If you enjoy memoirs, don't miss this one. I think it will stay with you for a long time

[Diane Yannick · Rating 4 out of 5]

Prosopagnosia was an unfamiliar term to me. After reading Heather's book I feel like I have a good understanding of the challenges of living with "face blindness". I especially related to her feelings when people tried to commiserate by saying, "Oh yeah, I have a lot of trouble remembering names too." Yeah guys, but that's not the problem. She can't differentiate the physical characteristics that distinguish individual faces. After my brain injury, countless well-meaning friends told me that they too get confused. They would give me examples of forgetting where their keys were or how they messed up a recipe. Meanwhile, I was sitting there trying to remember what keys were used for and what a recipe even was. It took too much energy to explain so I just nodded my baffled head. I thank this author for taking the time to explain her condition.

Her inability to remember faces created uncomfortable social situations and a lack of self confidence. Her parents were both struggling with their own mental illnesses and lacked the reserves to help their daughter. They just assumed that she too had inherited a mental illness. "I wanted to be related to my mom, not ruined by her." It wasn't until she was in college and got counseling that she learned to understand and advocate for herself. "Mental illness was less like obliteration and more like italics."

At first I wasn't a fan of Seller's writing style; by the end I loved it. At first I thought it lacked cohesion but later realized that she put us into pivotal scenes and invited us to put them together to create a whole. She didn't tell us how she was feeling; she trusted us to figure that out. Many of her scenes with David were poignant and gave us a window into how much her self esteem had dwindled.

Her therapy sessions provided gradual clarity. "I was going to be in therapy for a long, long time. I wasn't even a sentence yet. But I had some syllables, some new sounds. The first halves of sentences I was accumulating were solid. I trusted them."

[Mirkat · Rating 4 out of 5]

Prosopagnosia is the medical name for face blindness, though, as Heather Sellers explains in her memoir, people with this condition have no trouble seeing a face. The problem is the inability to remember those facial features and access those memories the next time the features present themselves. Sellers shares a fascinating account of a life in which she had persistent trouble with social interactions because so many people just look alike. It was not until she was well into adulthood that she realized that there was anything atypical about the way she perceives faces.

Sellers's memoir is not only about her condition, but also about her relationship with her eccentric parents. An offhand comment from an ex-boyfriend, uttered at their 20-year high-school reunion, led her to reconsider her mother's behavior and realize that she'd been raised by a paranoid schizophrenic, and not just someone who was "peculiar." As a child, she'd divided her time between this mother and an alcoholic father who was a secret cross-dresser.

There were times when Sellers would describe encounters where she'd failed to recognize friends or family members, and I'd be stunned that it didn't occur to her that this was not normal. "You're face blind," I wanted to yell. "DUH!" But if she'd never perceived differently, how would she know? Of course these people all look like other people. As Sellers begins to educate herself--and her readers--about this unusual condition, she also sheds light on brain processes and wiring most of us take for granted. Ultimately, Sellers concludes that prosopagnosia is a gift, one that forces her to accept uncertainty and follow an alternate path to resolving it.

[Dolly · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is an interesting memoir and account of a woman's life with prosopagnosia. The story is engaging and it's a quick read. Many of the characters are quite disturbing and I couldn't help think that I was fortunate to have grown up in a 'normal' family. I appreciate the author's openness and frank way that she revealed her most frightening thoughts and fears. I also like that she is willing to offer her story in the hopes of helping others. Overall, I thought this was a compelling story and a fascinating look into the world of someone who cannot recognize faces.

interesting quote:

"Mental illness was less like obliteration, more like italics." (p. 38)

"The brain, I had recently learned, has one task: to make sense. It is a visual organism, and for things to make sense, the eyes have to be level. The perceiving system does not function properly if the eyes aren't level. If a person is walking unevenly, because of back pain or a sore foot, the legs automatically compensate, one limping, dragging, slowing, or kicking out so it takes longer to arrive and complete the step - whatever it takes to keep the eyes at perfect level. The whole body works, in fact, for the eyes. Your knee might be torqued, your femur out of alignment, but the incoming visual information will route correctly. The brain cannot handle tilted." (pp. 232-233)

"What I did know was a hell of a lot about the nature of not-knowing. Which is, by definition, the opposite of mental illness. It's philosophy." (p. 251)

[Jenifer · Rating 3 out of 5]

I spent a great deal of this book highly irritated with the author. She seemed completely clueless about her parents' mental illnesses and her own personal issues (like a dysfunctional marriage to an alcoholic who went to AA but could still drink two beers and be ok). Perhaps I am jaded by own personal experiences having a mentally ill father. I just couldn't wrap my brain around the idea that she was so utterly unaware of issues that seemed so obvious. There seemed to be a family propensity towards denial given her cousin's assurance that there was no mental illness in the family (despite relating that she had been in a mental health facility, one aunt had a nervous breakdown and another was a prisoner in her bedroom because of agoraphobia.

Clearly, her disorder (facial blindness) is rare and not well understood. I had never heard of it until this book. But how did a college educated, seemingly intelligent woman ignore that something was wrong with her go so long? I was also shocked by how so many people reacted negatively to her as if she just said she liked to kill little kitties.

The ending redeemed the book a bit because it seemed to have the most clarity of thought. I still don't get get relationship with her ex - or his parenting skills - and I still don't get her father and what was wrong with him.

I don't know if I can recommend this book because it was such a headache to read.