Heather Sellers refers to the accident as one of those moments in life “when God hits you over the head and says, ‘Wake up!’” It was 1994. She was twenty-nine years old and living in San Antonio. Having received her PhD in English from Florida State University in Tallahassee two years earlier, she was now teaching at the University of Texas, her first real job out of school, her first time living outside her home state of Florida. Things were not going well. She couldn’t find her way around, everyone looked the same, and she wasn’t fitting in. “I remember calling my mom and telling her that I couldn’t recognize anybody, I couldn’t find anybody I knew,” she says. “‘I never see anybody twice,’ I told her.”

Sellers knew something was wrong. Everything just seemed so difficult; nothing came easy, least of all friendships—or any close relationships for that matter, personal or professional. But this was nothing new. As a child she had become increasingly anxious about her own mental health. Her parents had offered her little in the way of a solid foundation on which she could structure a confident sense of herself or the world around her. As she likes to put it: “Your parents show you what an inch is and they show you what a foot is and then you say, ‘Thanks, I can make a yardstick now.’ They show you how to see and be in the world. But with the information my mom was giving me, I wasn’t going to end up with a
yardstick.”

Sellers had grown up in the low wetlands of Orange County, Florida, in the middle of subtropical Orlando. She moved frequently—living with her mother here and her father there—to neighborhoods shrouded by jacarandas and pockmarked by lakes with names such as Jennie Jewel and Gem Mary. Her parents had an on-and-off-again marriage that eventually ended in divorce, but far more disruptive was their erratic behavior. Her mother stayed in her bedroom for days at a time, nailed all the windows shut, and hung thick blankets over the doors. She thought the house was under surveillance; she forbade the use of radios, telephones, and television—and insisted that Heather walk on her knees in order to protect the carpeting. Her father was an alcoholic who was capable of abuse (he once hit her with an iron skillet) and wore women’s garments, a bra and pantyhose, under his own clothes. He painted his fingernails and toenails; he shaved his chest.

Ironically, and perhaps most damaging of all, both her father and mother told Heather that she was the one who was emotionally disturbed. As she got older, it was more and more difficult to ignore their diagnosis. She had always been prone to getting lost; she was bad with directions and couldn’t differentiate between left and right. She had trouble recognizing anyone—even her own parents. Maybe they were right, she thought, maybe she was crazy.

Now, on her own in San Antonio, Sellers tried to get help. She started therapy, but had no idea where to begin. “I would say things like, ‘I don’t think my colleagues like me,’” she recalls with a laugh. “I had no idea what to talk about. I just didn’t know who I was. I couldn’t recognize myself. I hadn’t really woken up.”

When Sellers talks about the moment God hit her over the head, she means it more literally than one might think. Although she brings to bear an effortless Southern charm and, during the course of a conversation, unravels a kind of aw-shucks sense of humor that could put anyone at ease—two attributes that also come shining through in her poetry collections, The Boys I Borrow (New Issues Poetry & Prose, 2007) and Drinking Girls and Their Dresses (Ahsahta Press, 2002), and in her story collection, Georgia Under Water (Sarabande Books, 2001)—she grows serious when describing the accident.

She was out for a drive on a late summer afternoon when she made a left turn onto a country road. Not knowing which side she was supposed to be on (she had always relied on which way the signs were facing to orient herself; the rural road had none), she accelerated directly into the path of an oncoming car. The other driver was unharmed, but Sellers, who wasn’t wearing her seat belt, was thrown through the windshield and nearly killed. “I was in the hospital for a week,” she says. “I had all these stitches…and the nurse came in and asked, ‘Well, have you seen your face?’”

She hadn’t, and when she was handed a mirror, she saw pretty much what one would expect after a head-on collision. She’d suffered a severe concussion; her face was swollen, with two black eyes and deep lacerations on her cheeks and her upper lip that required more than eighty stitches to close.

But it wasn’t her injuries that were most disturbing. It was the fact that she didn’t recognize the face in the mirror. Even more unsettling was that she never had and, she says now, she probably never will. Heather Sellers has prosopagnosia, a rare neurological disorder that prevents her from recognizing faces. She is face blind.

Her new memoir, You Don’t Look Like Anyone I Know, published by Riverhead Books in October, is at once a compelling chronicle of the self-probing investigation that led Sellers to a diagnosis and a layperson’s account of living with the disorder. But it would be a mistake to label the book an illness memoir. Sellers is much more intellectually and emotionally curious than that. While prosopagnosia lies at the heart of the narrative, its true pulse is the author’s search for meaning, compassion, and ultimately forgiveness among the snapshots of a childhood in which she could not trust her parents’ skewed version of reality—or her own.

In his book The Mind’s Eye, published by Knopf in October, renowned author and physician Oliver Sacks traces prosopagnosia to the deep recesses of the human brain, to the “multimodal area of the medial temporal lobe,” he explains, “which has rich reciprocal connections not only to the fusiform face area but to other areas subserving sensory association, emotion, and memory.” In other words, you can’t really isolate a single area of the brain as the root of face blindness, since the region of the brain responsible for the human visual system is connected, via an infinitely complicated cognitive network, to many other parts of the brain.

According to Sacks, who is face blind himself, severe congenital prosopagnosia affects around 2 percent of the population, or about six million people in the United States. (Other notable face-blind figures include the late Kurt Vonnegut, anthropologist Jane Goodall, and painter and photographer Chuck Close.) “People with prosopagnosia,” Sacks writes, “need to be resourceful and inventive, need to find strategies, ways of circumventing their deficits: recognizing people by an unusual nose or beard, spectacles or a certain sort of clothing. Many prosopagnosics recognize people by voice, posture, or gait; and, of course, context and expectation are paramount—one expects to see one’s students at school, one’s colleagues at the office, and so on. Such strategies, both conscious and unconscious, become so automatic that people with moderate prosopagnosia can remain unaware of how poor their facial recognition actually is, and are startled if it is revealed to them by testing.”

So it was for Sellers, who, perhaps already at a deficit due to her family background, couldn’t pinpoint what was wrong and certainly didn’t realize that, in fact, she suffers from severe prosopagnosia. Although God had given her a good wallop down there in San Antonio—she picked glass out of her face for a long time after the accident—Sellers’s confusion about her childhood, her parents, and her own inability to recognize faces was too tightly coiled around her identity to be unraveled in that one instant. If the car accident was supposed to be God’s wake-up call, Sellers hit the snooze button.

After sticking it out in San Antonio for one more year, in 1995 she moved to the small town of Holland, Michigan, about thirty miles southwest of Grand Rapids, where she still lives and teaches English at Hope College, a private liberal arts school. She still couldn’t confront the overwhelming evidence that her mother was mentally ill (signs pointed to paranoid schizophrenia) or that there was a medical explanation for why she couldn’t recognize her own image in photographs.

Instead, she focused on writing—one of the few activities she could engage in that didn’t require social interaction. At her writing desk, she wasn’t expected to recognize anyone. “Socially it’s always been incredibly difficult to maintain friendships,” she says. “It’s like a dyslexic having to read books in public, out loud, and it was just this big struggle for me to go to a party and know and not know [who my friends are]. The isolation is actually good because I get my work done. So many writers get distracted; they maintain their friendships first and then they write. It’s so easy for me to put the writing first.”

But far from just resorting to writing as an activity to fill the hours of relative isolation, Sellers embraced the very process of writing, in particular, the creative uncertainty that every writer, any artist, knows and struggles with. For her, writing was second nature. “With any neurological disorder like this you’re so much more comfortable with chaos than an average person would be, an average writer,” she says. “I’m fine with taking a long time to get to the knowing part of it. It’s that negative capability thing: I’m fine with two things not making sense—I mean…this is the water I swim in! And I think that’s partly the mental illness at home and partly the face blindness. Not knowing, all these great writers tell us, is the state you’ve got to be moving toward. I’m in that place; that’s my address. Chaos doesn’t turn me away, and I think that is what’s so hard for many beginning writers, that initial stage where you sit and nothing’s going to make sense and it’s not going to work for a long time and you have to stay with that—I’m really, really good at that.”

Sellers immersed herself first in writing short stories, then poems—which, in retrospect, served as a kind of creative bridge to the memoir form. Her first book, Georgia Under Water, is a collection of linked stories, set in and around central Florida, about a precocious adolescent girl, Georgia Jackson, and her sexual awakening as she endures the ministrations of an overbearing mother and alcoholic father. “I couldn’t believe this was my family,” Sellers writes in the first story. “I felt this enormous crushing sense. It was never going to be any different. It was never going to be any better. It was never going to be a good family. Suddenly we sprawled in all directions, my family, like a man-o’-war after you poured sugar on it in the sea. Tearing itself apart, as its only way to survive.”

Sarah Gorham, a cofounder of Sarabande, remembers getting the manuscript and being fascinated by “Georgia’s hopelessly dysfunctional, surreal family life.” The book went on to become Sarabande’s all-time best-seller (Gorham says they were able to publish five books of poetry with the profits they made from the collection) and was reviewed in the New York Times—no small feat for a first story collection published by an independent press.

Although the book was labeled fiction, Sellers initially saw the stories as a direct extension of her own experiences growing up in Florida, with a name changed here and a location altered there. “I would go to readings and read this work and I believed at the time that it was all straight autobiography, that I had actually invented nothing,” she recalls. “Later I realized that no, the story I had told myself about my family, as a way to try to understand it, was absolutely invented. It was chilling, because I would give a reading and feel absolutely authentic and completely disingenuous at the same time—which is, I think, what it is to grow up in a house with mentally ill parents. This all makes perfect sense, it’s your mom and it’s your dad. But it makes absolutely no sense if I line it up with the rest of the world. I think the stories reflect that essential tension: It’s absolutely the truth and it’s completely invented. So then, when I found out about creative nonfiction, it was like, ‘Oh, this is what I’ve been trying to do all along.’ I’ve been trying to tell the truth, to see clearly, and that’s what the memoir is about: trying to makes sense of things that are not going to make sense and trying to know what is not knowable.”

Eight years after the car accident in San Antonio—eight years during which she remained unaware of her face blindness as well as her mother’s mental illness—Sellers had another one of those experiences when it felt like God hit her over the head. “I think everyone has one day like this, and some people have more than one,” Sellers writes in her memoir. “It’s the day of the accident, the midlife crisis, the breakdown, the meltdown, the walkout, the sellout, the giving up, giving away, or giving in. The day you stop drinking, or the day you start. The day you know things will never be the same again.”

It was 2002, and Ahsahta Press had just released Sellers’s first poetry collection, Drinking Girls and Their Dresses. (The first line in the book is “We are frantic families here.”) Still teaching at Hope College, Sellers was fitting in a little better in Holland than she had in San Antonio. For one thing, she was dating someone. Sellers had been seeing Dave—a man who had had to leave his first wife, a severely disabled schizophrenic, in order to keep his two teenage sons—for a couple years, and he and his sons already felt like family to her. So Sellers decided to take them to Florida to meet her mother and father.

The trip provides the entry point for the memoir, in which Sellers describes arriving in Orlando to find her father, who had suffered a stroke seven years earlier, in bad shape. (“He looked like he was a pile of pieces of a man,” she writes.) Her mother was nervous, unchanged—the windows nailed shut, the house shrouded in darkness. Still, Sellers was determined to introduce them to the man she planned to marry. (Later that year, in fact, they became husband and wife; but within two years they were divorced, and now remain friends.) Only a few minutes into the introductions, however, her mother inquired about Dave’s ex-wife and, after learning the details, wouldn’t allow Dave and his sons to stay in her house. In the memoir, Sellers describes the anxious scene:

“I told Dave I will pay for a room at the Jamaica Palms,” my mother was saying. “Can’t we just have a nice time together? Please? I have looked forward to your coming for so long! But honey, I can’t have your lifestyle in my house. I wasn’t raised like that. I didn’t raise you to flaunt—”

The Jamaica Palms motel was next to the razed gas station. The rooms were rented by the hour, had been for years. The pool was filled with trash bags and broken glass.

“I told them you wanted to be a grandma. I told them you love kids.”

“I wish people would stop using that word!” She clasped her gray, veiny hands to her ears. “I can’t take this!”

Dave and the boys cut their trip short and returned to Michigan, but Sellers stayed in Orlando to give a reading from Georgia Under Water and to attend her twentieth high school reunion. As she stood on the periphery of the party, watching strangers she had once called classmates (Sellers admits she had not been one of the popular kids: “I was so on the outside, you know, desperately bored, dressed weirdly, couldn’t interact, didn’t know who the hell I was talking to”), an ex-boyfriend spotted her. While they were chatting—catching up in that superficial way two people who were once close but are now separated by equal parts time, experience, and regret typically regard each other—he offhandedly asked, “What was up with your mother? What was she, paranoid schizophrenic?”

“And I thought, ‘God, what an asshole,’” Sellers recalls. “‘Asshole then, asshole now.’ What a mean thing to say. But afterward, driving back to my mother’s house where all the windows are locked and there are drapes over the doors—she won’t let me in, all this crazy stuff—there was like a rent in the fabric. I thought, ‘Oh God, maybe I knew this all along.’” And yet she still found it hard to believe that her mother was mentally ill. “Schizophrenics were like Dave’s first wife,” she writes in the memoir. “They were locked away, they were on meds, they were crazy, crazy people. My mom was peculiar. It was not possible for me to be thirty-eight years old and not to have known my mother was a paranoid schizophrenic.”

Rattled, Sellers returned to Michigan and immediately went to a bookstore and researched paranoid schizophrenics to find out if her mother exhibited any of their characteristic symptoms—seeing things that aren’t there, hearing things that no one else hears—to try and put an end to the creeping suspicion that she herself was crazy. Paging from one textbook to the next she took it all in and realized that her mother fit the descriptions she’d been reading. Then she came across a passage that contained two very simple yet, for her, life-altering words. What started out as a search for a better understanding of schizophrenia led to her first clue about face blindness. It was the one-two punch that finally woke her up.

The passage explained that schizophrenics had trouble reading emotions. They couldn’t tell what someone was thinking by their facial expression. They couldn’t utilize social cues. Irony was not available to them. I skimmed along until two words brought me to a complete standstill: facial recognition.

I put my fingers on the words and closed the book over my hand. I closed my eyes. The book was talking about emotions on faces, but the phrase itself, face recognition, made it easy to conflate the two concepts: reading emotion and identifying faces. It was as if I’d shaken a kaleidoscope. It was all the same pieces, but suddenly a long sequence of misunderstandings, from when I was very young to just the night before, sprang into light, lined up, crystallized.

It was as though all along I had been someone else, and now I had a glimpse of who was who.

From the twenty-ninth-floor terrace of the Orion, a residential skyscraper in midtown Manhattan, Heather Sellers has an unobstructed view of the entire length of the metropolis—to the south, the Statue of Liberty; to the north, Central Park and beyond. It is late summer in the city, and Sellers is renting a condominium for a monthlong visit, during which she is reveling in the excitement of prepublication marketing and publicity meetings at Riverhead, sitting for the occasional interview, and embarking on daylong excursions to popular sights in what she calls her “adopted hometown.”

As we talk on the sun-splashed terrace high above West 42nd Street, Sellers, whose mane of black hair keeps blowing up and down and across her face in the warm wind sweeping over the Hudson River, appears perfectly and beautifully at ease. She’s in her element up here among the soaring facades of New York City. It’s not what you might expect from a writer who lives in a small town, whose literary work up until now has been published only by small presses, and who is about to publish a revealing memoir about her mother’s mental illness and her own neurological disorder. The fact that she also just faced the challenge of meeting me in the lobby of her building without being able to rely on identifying facial features adds to an air of almost preternatural calm. (She jokes, however, that I was the only man sitting in the lobby, and therefore a pretty safe bet, and that after our brief walk to the elevator she will be forever able to recognize me by my gait, a comment that swiftly and efficiently turns the tables, leaving me the self-conscious one.)

As for any accompanying anxiety about publishing her memoir, Sellers is unequivocal. “I had to tell this story; there’s no way I’m not going to tell it. I knew a couple of weeks after I came across that phrase in the bookstore—that dramatic life-changing moment—I knew I’d be writing about it. It’s the gift a writer waits for her whole life.”

Sellers first wrote about her face blindness in an essay, published in the Fall/Winter 2006 issue of Alaska Quarterly Review, in which she describes the MRIs she underwent at Harvard University after she did more research and discovered that prosopagnosia exists. She goes on to explain that, though she finally had a diagnosis, it really only amounted to a fancy name, a label, and since there is no cure for face blindness, nothing really changed. “I am a girl steering a brain,” Sellers writes, “flying through space, like a neuron, with a destination, and a heart, and I’m still wondering. What do I know now?”

After the essay was published and later reprinted in the first volume of The Best Creative Nonfiction (Norton, 2007), edited by Lee Gutkind, it attracted the attention of several agents eager to see a book-length manuscript. The one to whom she felt a connection—the only one she met in person—was Chuck Verrill of Darhansoff, Verrill, Feldman. “I just kind of fell in love with him,” Sellers recalls. “I think you have to meet [an agent] in person. I didn’t really ask him about his connections or the selling or anything. We talked about our families and he got what I’m trying to do with family—to show how love for these incredibly flawed people sneaks in—and he just got that, and it was so moving to me, I chose him because of that.”

Verrill and another agent at the same agency, Michele Mortimer, helped Sellers edit the manuscript (initially written as a series of linked essays), and courted several publishers for offers, but the author eventually signed a deal with Rebecca Saletan, the editorial director of Riverhead Books. “I had offers from other publishers but I felt like all of them wanted it to be a kind of topic book, like maybe at the end there would be a ‘Guide to Living With Face Blindness,’ which I would be incapable of writing,” Sellers says.

At Riverhead, Saletan gave the memoir what she calls “a haircut,” trimming about a hundred pages and helping to braid the two strands that run through the book—the face blindness and the story of her family. The thematic link between those two strands, Saletan says, is what drew her to the memoir.

“There’s a relationship between the way in which face-blind people compensate for living with great uncertainty by taking their clues from surroundings, basically figuring out from context whom it is they’re talking to,” Saletan says. “And I thought there was a connection between that and the way she comes to terms with her past—that one of the ways we make our peace with the past is by seeing it in context. So even with these very problematic parents, this very dysfunctional family, she was able to see them in the broader sense of what they were, to see the demons they themselves were wrestling with.”

It would be a mistake to read You Don’t Look Like Anyone I Know in search of a thorough understanding of prosopagnosia (for that rather more clinical approach, one might look to Dr. Sacks), because what Sellers delivers is her personal take on living with the disorder—a decidedly uncertain, honest, and therefore realistic human story. Apart from waking up, finally, after so many years, to the reality of her face blindness, there is no satisfyingly simple resolution, no bow to tie around the final pages. Nor does Sellers strive for some kind of fanciful family-reunion scene to close out the narrative of her parents. Instead, Sellers does the only things that are in her power to do. She acknowledges the disorder. She forgives her parents.

Both of Sellers’s parents, now eighty, are suffering from dementia—her father, who suffered a second stroke, is in a nursing home, and her mother, whom Sellers describes as “very, very ill,” is in a care facility in Florida. While she is not in touch with her mother, Sellers recently set her father up with Skype so the two could talk regularly.

“It’s amazing to see him. I love him so much,” she says over the phone, a few hours after talking with him for the first time using the videoconferencing software. “He was this cross-dressing alcoholic, a really disturbed person. He was violent and abusive in so many ways, but I love him. It’s just so great to see him.

“I showed him the cover of the new book and I said, ‘I wrote about you, how do you feel?’ and he said, ‘Good, good, good, good, you should write.’ And I asked him, ‘Do you think it’s okay for everyone to write anything they want?’ And he was like, ‘Absolutely.’ I don’t know if he knows what he’s saying, but it made me really happy.”

Kevin Larimer is the editor of Poets & Writers Magazine.