You Don't Look Like Anyone I Know
Heather Sellers, 2010
Penguin Group USA
368 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781594487736
Summary
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 perspective: 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. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—c. 1964
• Where—Florida, USA
• Education—Ph.D., University of Florida
• Currently—teaches at Hope College-Holland, Michigan
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.
Her books include the short story collection, Georgia Under Water, a children’s book, Spike and Cubby’s Ice Cream Island Adventure, three volumes of poetry and three books on the craft of writing. She has also taught at the University of Texas—San Antonio and St. Lawrence University.
Her memoir about face blindness was published by Riverhead Books in 2010. She loves to ride her Bianchi bicycle and she rides in the rain. Heather was born and raised in Florida. (From the author's website.)
Book Reviews
It sometimes appears that contemporary memoir has become a game of misery poker, authors competing for the most appalling hand of woes. Face blindness would seem to be a trump card, but Sellers doesn't play it that way. On the contrary.... She views prosopagnosia as a gift...[and] believes her condition helped her as a writer by forcing her to focus on "the essence of the person," not the surface. The writing bears this out. Sellers captures the people in her life in spare, perfect strokes.... Her calm, glass-half-full-to- overflowing worldview could, in another writer's hands, veer toward treacle, but she pulls it off beautifully.
Mary Roach - New York Times
(Four-star review.) Never forget a face? What if you couldn't remember any? Sellers...learns to appreciate the upside: Being blind to faces makes it easier to see herself and those she loves as they really are.
People
Stunning...This is a memoir to be devoured in great chunks. The pleasure of reading it derives both from its graceful style and from its ultimate lesson: that seeing our past for what it really was, and forgiving those involved, frees us up to love them all the more, despite their (and our) limitations.
Bookpage
With buoyant honesty and vibrant charm, Sellers paints a spirited portrait of a dysfunctional family and a woman who nearly loses herself in her attempts to deny their abnormalities. Sure to appeal to fans of The Glass Castle (2005), Sellers limns an acutely perceptive tale of triumph over parental and physical shackles. —Carol Haggas
Booklist
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for You Don't Look Like Anyone I Know:
1. Borrowing a line from the movie, Men in Black...do you see anything "unusual" about the author's parents? What do you think of them—are they despicable, sad...or something else?
2. As a writer, Sellers draws on a rich vein of imagery to describe her mother and father—why might she have used that technique? Does her use of simile and metaphor paint a more, or less, vivid portrait than if she had used straight-forward prose?
3. As a child, how did Sellers justify her parents' strange behavior—how did she explain them to herself?
4. Later, Sellers tells us she has come to understand how her face-blindness enabled her to cope with her parents. What does she mean when she says, "I could sit and not-know the hell out of something, and it was a perfectly pleasant, nonchaotic way to spend time"?
5. Readers and reviewers alike have commented that, given both her face-blindness and upbringing, Sellers's memoir is remarkably free of anger. How do you explain the lack of bitterness? Compwhichare the tone of Sellers' memoir with other personal accounts you've read of painful childhoods.
6. Talk about Sellers' passage through the difficult years of adolescence—tough years to negotiate for any young person, let alone someone like Heather. What were her teenage struggles, and how do they compare to yours...or to anyone's typical teen years?
7. How does her then-fiance, Dave, enable Sellers to realize her family was not normal? What are the other ways in which Dave helps her?
8. Why does her marriage begin to fall apart? And why does it take so much time for Sellers to make the final break? What role does prosopagnosia play in the breakup...or does it play a role? Now that it's over, how does Sellers look back on her marriage?
9. Sellers is diagnosed with prosopagnosia in middle-age. Why has it taken so long to learn about her disorder? At first, Sellers feels tremendous relief. But a delayed reaction sets in, undermining her initial relief. Why the conflicting emotions?
10. People with Sellers' disorder have some delightful quirks: they love conferences—"festivals with labeled strangers." What else do prosopagnosiacs find enjoyable that the rest of us dislike?
11. Imagine that you have prosopagnosia. What would it be like? How well do you think you would cope? What would be most difficult? What techniques would you develop to make your world an easier place?
12. In what way has Sellers come to see prosopagnosia as a gift? How has it affected her writing...and her ability to comprehend people? Talk about her belief that the disorder fosters "the ability to live with uncertainty, to be receptive to all that a person might turn out to be, literally and metaphorically." What does she mean?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)