Sellers Tells Her Story Of Face Blindness And Family
By Betsy Mikel in Arts & Entertainment on Nov 16, 2010 8:00PM
Heather Seller’s memoir You Don’t Look Like Anyone I Know weaves together three important pieces of the author’s life. There’s her own face blindness condition, which she doesn’t come to understand until she is an adult. Sellers has prosopagnosia, which means she cannot adequately process the unique combinations of people’s noses, cheeks or eyes to remember even the most familiar of faces. Then, she discusses growing up in two very bizarre households. Her father is a cross-dressing alcoholic, and she believes her mother is an undiagnosed paranoid schizophrenic. And there’s her rocky relationship with a thrice-divorced man who is extremely understanding and patient, but who isn’t big on compromise.
Although Seller’s writing style is simple and her book is easy to read, she doesn’t simplify any of its complexities. She continuously explores the relationships between her family, marriage and her neurological condition. Do her childhood experiences explain why she has trouble recognizing people’s faces, even those of close friends and family? Or is her brain’s mixed-up wiring completely unrelated to what might be wrong with her parents? Is her desire for a perfect family the reason why she entered into an imperfect marriage?
In exploring the answers to these questions, Sellers transitions between the present and the past. She describes her terror at discovering a stranger on her roof, only to realize it is her husband doing a repair. Then, she’ll bounce back to her chaotic childhood with a mother whose paranoia and confusion kept her daughter locked away from the outside world. Ultimately, Sellers comes to admit that the genetic relationship between these two experiences is a non-issue. Her life contains all these experiences. And if she is ever to learn how to deal with her inability to process and remember faces or to better understand her mother, she must move from an observer in her own life to someone who takes control of it.
Easier said than done, Sellers discovers. Although her face blindness doesn’t make her mentally ill, the survival tactics she developed living with a mentally ill mother still remain into her adulthood. And, as Sellers repeats over and over, she does love her mother, regardless of how challenging it was to live with her. She doesn’t deny that she absolutely cannot visualize her husband’s face or that her mother may be paranoid schizophrenic. But it’s scary for her to say those things to the world at large because further action or explanation might be required. Sellers doesn’t want to be seen as less of a person because she isn’t “normal.” But she finds that being honest about her history and her own disorder is an extremely important first step.
Heather Sellers reads from You Don't Look Like Anyone I Know tomorrow night at Gage Gallery at Roosevelt University, 18 S. Michigan Ave. The event starts at 5 p.m.