You Don't Look Like Anyone I Know

January 17, 2011
As a child, Sellers moved between households; her alcoholic father drank all night, slept all day, and wore women's clothing on evenings out. Her schizophrenic mother provided no respite; windows were nailed shut in her house, light bulbs were bare, sponge baths were taken in the garage. Sellers remembers watching kids play and "wondering which ones had mothers who would adopt an extra girl." But it's her realization that she suffers from prosopagnosia (face blindness) that ultimately propels her to seek professional help. At her core, she learns, she is a product of her condition; she'd never married, had no children, constantly sought new houses, jobs, cities, people. She was "only comfortable in ambivalence." To recover she must utterly change her life. In one excruciating incident, Seller's listens to a companion complain about a co-worker seated, unbeknownst to her coworker, nearby; though Sellers can see him, she can't recognize him, ultimately ruining another friendship. But with the help of a therapist, Sellers begins telling people about her condition. Sellers handles the jagged transitions between past and present deftly, explaining her life as a story of "how we love each other in spite of immense limitations."

August 15, 2010

One woman's struggle with a rare neurological illness.

Sellers (Creative Writing/Hope Coll.; Chapter After Chapter, 2009, etc.) weaves a tale in which the adult version of herself pushes back against the adolescent version in search of the impetus of her illness, prosopagnosia. More commonly known as face blindness, it renders the victim incapable of differentiating between faces. The author discovered it while waiting in line at Walgreens. After staring at the celebrities on the cover of People, she realized, "I recognized the names—Jennifer Aniston, Angelina Jolie, Britney, Jessica—but not the faces." Her problem worsened as she embarked on a new relationship with her soon-to-be husband, Dave, whose previous wife suffered mental problems, and whom Sellers believes understands her own problems because his last marriage forced him "to pitch a tent in the land of the insane." On a trip to Disney World with Dave and his children, she suddenly felt alone amid the swelling crowd, becoming frantic and shouting for the children. When she finally stumbled upon them, a dumbfounded stepson said, "She looked right at me," to which Sellers could only reply, "I didn't see." The author frequently switches the narrative back to her adolescence, recounting a family life in which her cross-dressing, alcoholic father played a unique foil to her paranoid schizophrenic mother. Sellers endured the worst from both parents, and she searched for escape during her freshman year of college. Yet she soon discovered that despite her difficulties with her psychologically unstable parents, she remained connected to them, particularly her mother, whose schizophrenic behavior, she believes, was just a few shades away from her own face blindness. For Sellers, every interaction is predicated by the knowledge that she will not recognize the person she's interacting with—a problem that cannot be solved, only accepted.

A gripping personal account of the mental effects of an unyielding medical condition.

(COPYRIGHT (2010) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

September 1, 2010
Her mother was a paranoid schizophrenic who nailed shut the windows of her Florida home, draped sheets over the television, and believed she was the target of government agents. Her father was a gin-swigging cross-dresser who took swings at her with a cast-iron skillet. No wonder then that Sellers feared she herself might be crazy when she realized that she was unable to reliably recognize the faces of friends, colleagues, even family members when she saw them on the street. Eventually diagnosed with the rare neurological disorder prosopagnosia, otherwise known as face blindness, Sellers was relieved to learn she wasnt mentally ill, yet struggled to find a way to cope with her disorder. 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.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)

August 15, 2010

One woman's struggle with a rare neurological illness.

Sellers (Creative Writing/Hope Coll.; Chapter After Chapter, 2009, etc.) weaves a tale in which the adult version of herself pushes back against the adolescent version in search of the impetus of her illness, prosopagnosia. More commonly known as face blindness, it renders the victim incapable of differentiating between faces. The author discovered it while waiting in line at Walgreens. After staring at the celebrities on the cover of People, she realized, "I recognized the names--Jennifer Aniston, Angelina Jolie, Britney, Jessica--but not the faces." Her problem worsened as she embarked on a new relationship with her soon-to-be husband, Dave, whose previous wife suffered mental problems, and whom Sellers believes understands her own problems because his last marriage forced him "to pitch a tent in the land of the insane." On a trip to Disney World with Dave and his children, she suddenly felt alone amid the swelling crowd, becoming frantic and shouting for the children. When she finally stumbled upon them, a dumbfounded stepson said, "She looked right at me," to which Sellers could only reply, "I didn't see." The author frequently switches the narrative back to her adolescence, recounting a family life in which her cross-dressing, alcoholic father played a unique foil to her paranoid schizophrenic mother. Sellers endured the worst from both parents, and she searched for escape during her freshman year of college. Yet she soon discovered that despite her difficulties with her psychologically unstable parents, she remained connected to them, particularly her mother, whose schizophrenic behavior, she believes, was just a few shades away from her own face blindness. For Sellers, every interaction is predicated by the knowledge that she will not recognize the person she's interacting with--a problem that cannot be solved, only accepted.

A gripping personal account of the mental effects of an unyielding medical condition.

(COPYRIGHT (2010) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)