Book Fifteen

You Don't Look Like Anyone I Know: A true story of family, face blindness, and forgiveness
Heather Sellers

In Sellers's memoir, she recounts her childhood (living with a mother she later determined was paranoid schizophrenic and chasing after her mostly-absentee father who was a cross-dressing alcoholic) while intermittently describing her self discovery of her own prosopagnosia.  Late in the book, in the Afterward, in fact, Sellers writes that when she had shared stories of her childhood in the past, professional writers had told her that it was "unbelievable" and "unsurvivable."  There are moments that surely feel that way.

In truth, because most of us suffer from the inability to remember names of our acquaintances, it's easy to feel that her chapters on prosopagnosia--or face blindness--are just as unbelievable.  I appreciated the mix of anecdotal information (such as the golden retriever test--you may have had your dog for years, but if we put pictures of his face in a line up of 20 other golden retrievers, could you pick yours out?) along with scientific information about how the brain recognizes faces and identifies them and their characteristics. 

Sellers is a professor of English at a local college.  She is a good writer, and I think the book is well organized.  I appreciated her transitions between her (truly unbelievable!) childhood and its impacts on her realizations about who she is as an adult and her willingness to believe the truth about her condition.  Childhood is a confusing time and, even under normal conditions, our recollections about it color so much about our adulthoods.  When a brain disorder factors into that, it becomes even more difficult to see the truth and grow in that truth.  There are more things to ask forgiveness for and to offer forgiveness for.  But, at the end of the day, the forgiveness is worth it.

While You Don't Look Like Anyone I Know is a fascinating story about Heather Sellers's reality, it is also an important lesson for all of us.  It's a reminder to extend grace, because you never know what burdens others are carrying.  It's a reminder to give others permission to be real, even when their authenticity is scary or painful.  It's also a reminder to believe in each other, even when the truth seems unbelievable. 

Someone once asked me, after hearing me talk about my relationship with my grandmother, "Why do you even love her?" 

I remember looking at that person like she was crazy and saying, "Because she's my grandma."

I thought about that a lot while reading this book.  And I was glad to hear Sellers say that at the end of the day, while laying out her story and recalling her childhood and her journey into accepting her face blindness, she could see that throughout her life there had been love.  There had been love for her mother and her father and love from them for her.  She concludes: "I'd set out to write a book about how we learn to trust our own experience in the face of confusion, doubt, and anxiety.  What I ended up with is the story of how we love each other in spite of immense limitations."  (p354) Amen.  Sellers reminded me of that as well.