Book review: ‘You Don't Look Like Anyone I Know'

In much the way a dyslexic is unable to read a word, Sellers is unable to "read" a face to discover who the person is. Without being told who she's watching, she can’t even identify herself in a home movie.

To complicate matters, Sellers grew up with a schizophrenic mother who hid in the closet without speaking for days, refused to talk on the phone and covered the TV with a blanket every night. Her father was a alcoholic who cross-dressed and used his daughter’s nail polish to paint his toes.

When Sellers was 13, her parents, noticing the affect their behavior was having on their daughter, decided she was emotionally disturbed. Between their diagnosis and her face blindness, Sellers thought for much of her life that she was the crazy one.

As the book opens, Sellers, now a college English teacher and published author, returns to her hometown of Orlando, Fla.,  with her husband-to-be and his two boys. The plan is to attend a 20th high school reunion and visit her mother and father, neither of whom she’s seen in three years. She can’t wait for her “dear peculiar mother” and her beloved “wild daddy” to meet her new family.

But Sellers' parents aren't the way she remembers them at all. In fact, they act insane. They look insane. At the reunion, an old boyfriend plies Sellers with questions about her family: How did she survive? Did everyone else end up in a mental institution? And what was up with her mother? "What was she, paranoid schizophrenic?"

From then on, everything Sellers ever told herself about her family undergoes a transformation. For the first time, she begins to read about mental illness, and to question what, for 38 years, she has chalked up to eccentric behavior. What if her mother wasn't "just peculiar, quirky, wacky, safety-conscious, different," she wonders, "but truly insane?"

She was. In discovering that her mother’s behaviors match the textbook symptoms of schizophrenia, Sellers stumbles across the term prosopagnosia, which explains her inability to distinguish facial features. It confirms that the confusion she's suffered for years stems from a neurological disorder. So much for her being the crazy one.

If a grown-up and very funny Mary Engelbreit were recalling her childhood in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” this book might be the result. Sellers seems to have inherited both the batty, charming side of her parents’ personalities as well as their forbearance in the face of insanity; her outlook remains jaunty no matter how many windows her mother nails shut.

Sellers credits face blindness for helping her survive her childhood and teaching her the patience for the shaky journey she undertook to find herself. She thinks of it as the best training a writer could have. “In both, writing and recognizing, one had to hang back, leave spaces for the truth to emerge in its own time.”

If so, it paid off. Her touch is deft and sure and endlessly kind, whether she’s writing about her father’s weakness for pantyhose or the cardboard box her mother carried wherever she went: “In her box was her purse, wrapped in a plastic Zayre bag, a nasty old apple, bits of aluminum foil, a thermos of coffee, and a plastic container of water. There were old Triscuits in used wax paper, carefully folded into a tight envelope: mom origami.”

Despite the fact that her parents were also capable of the kind of criminal neglect that should have gotten them locked up, Sellers' understanding of the loneliness and fears that drove them makes one thing certain: Instead of an ability to recognize faces, she somehow ended up with a bigger heart.

Asked if she would welcome a cure for her condition, Sellers says she wouldn’t change a thing.

Face-blindness, she says, taught her to recognize herself. “It’s what connects me so deeply to other people. We all have this experience of trying to love others, and that is basically a process of attempting to ‘see’ someone, know which person they are. Love is recognition.”

After finally coming out about her prosopagnosia, e-mailing everyone at her job to explain her condition, Sellers is inundated with replies. In one, the writer asks, “Do you want me to reintroduce myself to you once or always?” It’s the question, Sellers says, that “matters the most.”

I want you to always, she answers.

NONFICTION

You Don’t Look Like Anyone I Know

Heather Sellers

Riverhead Books, $25.95, 356 pages