You Don't Look Like Anyone I Know

You Don't Look Like Anyone I Know by Heather Sellers, 356 pages

Heather Sellers is a successful English professor, with a complicated family life: her mom is likely a paranoid schizophrenic, her dad is definitely an alcoholic and likely has other mental issues as well, and her marriage is a strained one, as she and her husband don't see eye-to-eye on anything, from politics to what they want in a house. But Sellers' life is most complicated by face-blindness, her inability to recognize people's faces, no matter how well she knows them. This book covers Sellers' version of a coming-out story, the challenge of convincingly explaining her condition to her colleagues and friends, and the mountains of emotional baggage she had to unpack along the way.

This is a true story, and it's amazing how long Sellers went in life before being diagnosed with prosoagnosia, a rare neurological condition that makes it nearly impossible to recognize someone by their facial features (unless those features are REALLY distinctive; in describing the testing that was done to determine her diagnosis, she mentions that she was able to recognize a picture of Julia Roberts (sans hair and ears) by her toothy smile). This is a fascinating story, and well worth the read. I'm glad Sellers chose to share it.