When I began this blog, I wrote in the space called “About Me” that part of my purpose in starting it was to be able to write about books that fell outside my reviewing niche at the paper I work for. Now I realize it’s more than that. I want to be able to write a different kind of review of some of those books too. I’m currently making notes for a review of a memoir by Heather Sellers, whose writing books (Page After Page, Chapter After Chapter) are some of the best ways I know of to get inspired.
Just as I learned how to spell synesthesesia, the name of the perceptual disorder that causes Linda Hammerick to taste words in Monique Truong’s Bitter in the Mouth, along comes prosopagnosia, another rare neurological condition. It’s the inability to recognize faces, and in You Don’t Look Like Anyone I Know, Sellers describes one of her most embarrassing episodes with it:
Earlier that week, I’d come back to Michigan from upstate New York, where I was working as a visiting writer during my sabbatical year, so we could all go to Florida together. Dave [her husband] had picked me up at the airport. I saw him before he saw me, walking down the corridor, past the narrow sports bar. Dave always wore running shoes and his walk was a distinctive leaning-forward walk, springy and gentle…I ran up to him and threw my arms around him and stretched up to kiss him; he drew back, pressing me away.
It wasn’t Dave. I had the wrong guy.
Dave—my real Dave—came up a moment later; we laughed about my mistake. I was embarrassed he had seen me hugging another man. “So many people here look like you!” I said. “We need to move. To a place with fewer Dutch people.” This had happened numerous times before, my mistaking someone else for Dave.
Sellers’ acknowledgment and descriptions of her awkward mix-ups—she doesn’t recognize her own mother in a convenience store, noting a “tiny, elderly woman at the counter, nervous,” who stares hard at her and seems angry—are essentially lighthearted and funny, despite how grueling it’s been for her to cope with her condition all her life. When I read about her childhood, with an alcoholic father and a mother whose psychosis defies description (except, of course, in Sellers’ book), I wondered if a lifetime of trying to pretend things were okay when they weren’t might lead to an inability to recognize the familiar.
8 Hamilton Ave. 