You Don't Look Like Anyone I Know
Search in google:
An unusual and uncommonly moving family memoir, with a twist that give new meaning to hindsight, insight, and forgiveness. 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. The New York Times - Mary Roach 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.
