Photo: Ben Goldstein/Studio D
You Don't Look Like Anyone I Know
By Heather Sellers
368 pages; Riverhead
Trouble remembering names? Heather Sellers has a more confusing problem. In her memoir, You Don't Look Like Anyone I Know, Sellers reveals that she suffers from face blindness, a rare condition called prosopagnosia. She doesn't know if she's looking at Brad Pitt or Winston Churchill in a photo, can't identify her students outside the classroom; she has even hugged a stranger in lieu of her boyfriend. Weird? For sure. Odder still, she lived with neither diagnosis nor cure until midlife, questioning her sanity, thanks in part to a bizarre childhood with an undiagnosed schizophrenic mother who liked to nail the windows shut. Although she can't recognize others, in this book she has managed to find herself.
By Heather Sellers
368 pages; Riverhead
Trouble remembering names? Heather Sellers has a more confusing problem. In her memoir, You Don't Look Like Anyone I Know, Sellers reveals that she suffers from face blindness, a rare condition called prosopagnosia. She doesn't know if she's looking at Brad Pitt or Winston Churchill in a photo, can't identify her students outside the classroom; she has even hugged a stranger in lieu of her boyfriend. Weird? For sure. Odder still, she lived with neither diagnosis nor cure until midlife, questioning her sanity, thanks in part to a bizarre childhood with an undiagnosed schizophrenic mother who liked to nail the windows shut. Although she can't recognize others, in this book she has managed to find herself.
From the November 2010 issue of O, The Oprah Magazine
