Heather SellersBesprekingen

A different kind of writing book than the ones I'm used to... The author recommends slowing down, enjoying the writing process, writing for the love of it and not worrying about publication. I take pride in being productive, writing fast and writing well, so many of her recommendations didn't resonate with me. And yet, others did. Suggestions about how to stay in love with your book and how to fight the dreaded book "Creep" apply to all of us. (A-)

These poems are so relevant to today’s ever-changing coastal areas, and living near a (northern) coast, I see many of the same parallels to storms, huge mansions being built that will one day be surrounded by water, and all the feelings that go along with loving your home but knowing it may not be the safest place, geographically. While I could relate, some lines seemed too long or didn’t quite flow with the poems.

*I received a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.*½

Heather Sellars poetry talks about ordinary life in an extraordinary place. A place where storms come every year, yet humans believe that this place is safe from the forces of nature. I was surprised at the peeks of familial relationships in the poems. Having recently dealt with my aging parents, now I am myself an aging parent. The cycles of humanity and nature go on and on.

It's been a while since I've read a poetry collection. It was a pleasant surprise to come upon "Field Notes from the Flood Zone". Other than the very first poem, I resonated with all of the poems in the book. Normally it's difficult for me to read a poetry collection without taking a day or two in between each poem. With this book I found an easy flow reading all of the poems.

I was interested in this book as I have been living in Florida for almost 3 years and am concerned about climate change. I found Heather Sellers writing relatable and easily immersible. Again I don't know what it is about the first poem that throws me off. It's the only one that felt so disjointed to me that I couldn't reread it. Perhaps that is the point.

I found so many themes in this poetry collection that I wasn't expecting such as our relationships to the material, mother-daughter, the water, and death. I received this book as part of the Early Reviewer's club. I will be keeping my copy to reread and recommending it to others. Thank you Heather Sellers for sharing your stories.

Publisher's summary:

From the frontlines of climate catastrophe, a poet watches the sea approach her doorstep.

Born and raised in Florida, Heather Sellers grew up in an extraordinarily difficult home. The natural world provided a life-giving respite from domestic violence. She found, in the tropical flora and fauna, great beauty and meaningful connection. She made her way by trying to learn the name of every flower, every insect, every fish and shell and tree she encountered.

That world no longer exists.

In this collection of poems, Sellers laments its loss, while observing, over the course of a year, daily life of the people and other animals around her, on her street, and in her low-lying coastal town, where new high rises soar into the sky as the storm clouds gather with increasing intensity and the future of the community--and seemingly life as we know it--becomes more and more uncertain.

Sprung from her daily observation journals, haunted by ghosts from the past, Field Notes from the Flood Zone is a double love letter: to a beautiful and fragile landscape, and to the vulnerable young girl who grew up in that world. It is an elegy for the two great shaping forces in a life, heartbreaking family struggle and a collective lost treasure, our stunning, singular, desecrated Florida, and all its remnant beauty.

Review:

This book of poetry was easy to read and digest. However, I often felt that the author would write sentences down, like she were collecting them, then link them together even if they didn't feel connected to each other...resulting in a poem with one sentence that would feel tossed in and disconnected to all the rest. It would have felt tighter and flowed better lyrically without these extraneous inserts that could feel jarring. Regardless, this poetry collection is a pleasure to read and timely for the extreme weather and environmental situations we find ourselves in. 4 stars. (Early Reviewer)

Heather Sellers’ You Don’t Look Like Anyone I Know is the story of a woman at times very familiar to me. Nevertheless, she possesses an unusual trait–one I had never heard about until I read the book.

She has prosopagnosia, or face blindness, meaning that she can’t recognize other people by their faces. Instead, she has to learn how to recognize people by context, setting, clothing, and hair style.

In this memoir, the reader gets inside the world of a girl growing up with an invisible and (for a long time) unrecognized disability. Sellers didn’t understand what was wrong with her. Neither did her family. Her parents had some serious problems of their own, and they were of no help to Sellers. Rather, they made clear that they considered her crazy.

I was thoroughly engaged with Sellers’ story and was sorry to see the book come to an end.

I recommend this book for anyone who wants to write, whatever style or preferred method. It has solid advice on how to keep writing, not how to write. A must read for anyone interested in becoming an author.

This book didn't work for me. I think that for the people who it does work for, it will be a great resource. However, something about the writing style rubbed me the wrong way, and I couldn't take the advice seriously. It has a good message at its heart, I think, but too often it was obscured by things that got in the way of the message.

The author's miserable childhood, with an alcoholic father and a paranoid schitzofrenic mother, pale next to her inability to recognize people by their faces. This condition, Prosopagnosia, has become more familiar to us by way of books like this and media reports, but it's still a devastating diagnosis. Now an English professor at a college, Sellers drags us through a misbegotten marriage with a man who provides her with love and support but can't save his own libertarian self from drinking and general inability to get off his ass and do anything. Not by any means an enjoyable read, but certainly beneficial in its vivid explanations of facial blindness.½

I have taught (and studied) creative writing with a lot of books. I loved this book the first time I taught from it and continue loving it because it isn't your run-of-the-mill creative writing textbook. So many of them focus on the same thing (and those topics aren't bad, but they're done to death), topics like plot, characters, setting, etc. Sellers focuses on elements that are usually glossed over in other texts, and that is what I appreciate about her book.

Astonishing. Couldn't put it down.

Everyone experiences forgetting someone’s name, but almost everyone can recognize faces of acquaintances and of loved ones. We know those familiar faces we see at the grocery store or at your child’s school. We might even go up to someone, let them know that they look familiar, and ask where we might have met. Amazingly, facial recognition is a learned behavior, something learned during the first six months of life, and the ability to recognize faces has a lasting impact on one’s social and professional life. Not everyone learns this skill however, either through brain trauma or physiological reason. Such is the life of Heather Sellers. In You Don't Look Like Anyone I Know Ms. Sellers describes the emotional journey of finding out that she has a rare medical condition in which is she is completely unable to recognize anyone’s face, even her own. She discusses the coping mechanisms she has inadvertently used her entire life to function in society and addresses the issues she continues to have because of misunderstandings and other miscues. Along with her own personal discovery, she makes some startling revelations about her mother’s mental health. The resulting story is one of medical discovery and personal growth as she learns to accept the flaws within others and herself.

While prosopagnosia has far-reaching consequences for those who are fated with it, there is something about Ms. Sellers’ lack of earlier detection that is difficult to accept. She knows that she does not recognize people on the street. She has plenty of examples of looking friends in the eyes and ignoring them because she does not know who they are. She tries to avoid any gathering in which she will be forced to interact with a multitude of people. She has lost friends and isolated herself from most of her peers. Yet, she never seeks medical help to find out why she is this way; she never connects the dots that there is something more than forgetfulness. She does not obtain any medical guidance until she is almost 40 years old. To make matters worse, when she does find out the truth, she hesitates to tell others for fear of embarrassment and reprisal. Therein lies my sense of incredulity. Why would someone wait so long before seeking help, and more importantly, why be afraid to tell others? Why the worry about what others are going to think?

Along the same vein, Ms. Sellers will strike a reader as terribly conflicted and therefore not the most sympathetic narrator. On the one hand, she is successful, outgoing, fiercely independent, and self-aware. Yet, in certain avenues of her life, she is exceedingly obtuse. Her relationship with David is one example of this, as most readers will recognize the danger signs of a doomed relationship almost from the very beginning, yet it takes Ms. Sellers months to come to the same conclusions. The same holds true for her parents’ behaviors. The significant amount of denial it takes to turn a blind eye to schizophrenic behavior or dangerous drinking patterns is as astonishing as it is difficult to believe. There is no doubt that her upbringing was indeed tragic and very difficult, but a reader will still be left with a sense of disbelief at the extreme behaviors of her entire family and her absolute refusal to seek help.

You Don't Look Like Anyone I Know gets its strength from the intriguing discussions and explanations of prosopagnosia. Its rarity among the population and the implications for those few people who have it open up an entirely new world of medical knowledge regarding facial recognition in the brain and just how closely humans rely on that trained skill for everything. The memoir is weakest when Ms. Sellers discusses her adulthood prior to her diagnosis. Her failure to obtain help earlier as well as her initial unwillingness to share her diagnosis with others does not mesh well with the description of someone who is fairly self-aware and outgoing. As a learning tool and exposure to a rare neurological condition, You Don't Look Like Anyone I Know exceeds expectations. Unfortunately, as a memoir, it only confirms why I tend to avoid this genre.

This memoir about a woman who, as an adult, realizes she cannot recognize faces reads like a novel. She jumps back and forth from stories of her childhood to her life in the time frame when she is discovering that she is not crazy, she has face blindness. I enjoyed it.½

Heather Sellers has a rare neurological condition that leaves her unable to recognize faces. This is her memoir of trying to live an adult life with this disorder. I expected that the memoir would begin with Heather having a diagnosis, but that is not the case. For most of her adult life Sellers had no idea why she couldn't recognize people, and she had to try and compensate. Much of the memoir chronicles Heather's search for a diagnosis.

This book is also a story about childhood. Sellers grew up with mentally ill and negligent parents. Her parents had little time for Heather's problems; they were consumed by their own. This helps to explain how Sellers could grow into adulthood unaware that she had a neurological problem.

I learned a great deal from this book. I had never heard of this particular disorder, prosopagnosia. Indeed, it is rare. In a world in which everyone seems to claim that they have problems recognizing faces, it is hard to recognize, and get recognition, for such a disorder. It is also difficult to get a diagnosis.

Really, there's enough material for two memoirs here: one on childhood, and one on face-blindness. The jumping back and forth from childhood to adulthood was sometimes distracting. Like many other children of troubled parents Heather is still searching for their approval and love as an adult, which leads to problems with attachment and commitment. The best example of this is Sellers's unwillingness to share a home with her husband. Sometimes I found myself feeling the most empathy for Heather's husband. He seems to have put up with quite a bit, both in regard to his wife's commitment issues, and with his troublesome in-laws. This is not necessarily the best memoir I have ever read, but it does tackle interesting and rare subject matter, and I have certainly developed a new appreciation of how difficult it must be not to recognize others' faces.

I have a friend who is face blind, so this was really interesting. It's so hard to imagine being unable to recognize people by their faces, and such a skill I take very much for granted. I've read a lot of rough childhood memoirs, and this is one of the most well-written and engaging I've encountered so far. I'd definitely recommend it to anyone interested in face blindness or schizophrenia.

What's interesting to me about this memoir is not the linear story, but connections between Ms. Seller's condition and her life experiences. Her inability to recognize faces is coupled with her inability to recognize normal - she talks about wanting to be seen as normal, and yet she can't see the abnormal in her own life. I felt almost like this book was a journey to discover reality. Interesting stuff on Prosopagnosia.

An amazing story of growing up with mentally ill parents.

Read about the book and author on NPR: http://www.npr.org/2010/11/12/131267727/living-with-face-blindness-who-are-you-a...

This is a memoir of a modern American woman with profound face-blindness, a condition technically called prosopagnosia. This book chronicles her childhood and young adulthood, as she figures out first, that there is something different about herself; second, what that difference is; and third, how to "come out" and deal with other people's reactions to it. She does not need to learn how to deal with the condition itself - that's just how she is and it has been a part of her all her life. She recognizes people by the clothes they wear, the way they walk and talk, and whether they act as if they know her. This means that if someone leaves the room then returns with coat and hat on, she does not recognize them until they speak, because they don't look like they did a few moments ago.

Why was it not immediately clear that she perceived things differently than the rest of her family? It was clear to her, but since her mother was a paranoid schizophrenic and her father was an alcoholic, her perceptual difficulties were "drowned out" by the other problems in the family.

This is a moving book about growing up - with mental illness, with perceptual difficulties, and always with an edge of uncertainty. This book chronicles her search to figure out her life. It was fascinating. The author is intelligent, perceptive, and curious, and above all, seeks to understand herself and her family. It is a story told with kindness and love.

All of her life, Heather Sellers had trouble recognizing people she knew. It wasn’t until she was well into adulthood that she discovered she had prosopagnosia, which meant that her brain was unable to distinguish one face from another. This memoir details her struggles with the disorder, her attempts to live a normal life, and her unsteady marriage to a man with three sons. The book is interspersed with flashbacks to her bizarre childhood when her parents, who were separated because of her mother’s unbalanced behavior, which Sellers comes to realize much later was schizophrenia. This is a well-written and fascinating book.½

You Don’t Look Like Anyone I Know was a unique read. Heather Sellers’ memoir is not only a book about a dysfunctional family with a capital D, but also the story of how Seller’s realizes she suffers from prospagnosia, or facial blindness. An obscure condition, prospagnosia , is an inability to recognize faces, and finally caused Seller to seek the help she desperately needed. I had never heard of facial blindness before and the effects it had on Sellers made this title a fascinating book.

Reading about Heather Sellers childhood is like reading an account of time spent in a war zone; her mother is an untreated (and undiagnosed) paranoid schizophrenic who makes everyone walk on their knees to protect the carpet, nails the windows shut and is convinced that the TV takes in information about them and her father is a raging alcoholic who never seems to think about anyone but himself. Sellers bounces back and forth between the two, trying to look normal at school and all the while thinking that she herself has a mental illness. She’s in her late 30s before she discovers that her own problem is called prosopagnosia, a neurological problem that causes one to be unable to recognize faces, even those of close friends and family- even, for that matter, oneself in a photo.

Despite her horrific upbringing, the author is very successful in her professional life. She attends college, gets her PhD, writes a collection of short stories and is a professor at a Michigan college. Her personal life, though, is less successful. She loses friends because they think she is snubbing them when in reality, she just does not recognize them unless she meets them in a space where she is expecting them to be, they have not changed their hair, and are dressed in a style that is usual for them. She, an NPR listening left winger, is engaged to, married to and then divorced from without ever having lived with an alcoholic Libertarian.

She self diagnoses herself and then is tested at Harvard, proving that she is correct. Validated, she finds that she is all right with who she is. For the first time in her life, she knows that she is not mentally ill. After hard pushing by her therapist, Sellers comes out to people. It’s a hard sell; people don’t already know about face blindness and so they don’t know how to react. Some people ignore it; some people deny it; some people have lots of questions. But it’s all okay; Sellers is okay. She finally knows who she is. She’s a survivor. It’s an amazing story.

If Heather Sellers were a physicist she'd be the Queen of Chaos; but since she's a professor of English maybe she should have the title Abbess of Ambiguity. Her life has been lived in uncertain circumstances. She was raised by a woman she later realizes is paranoid schizophrenic and who brightly discusses her delusions as if they are real and rails against the dangers inherent in sleeping at other people's houses, eating restaurant food, or using the telephone. She attended new schools every year or even more than one a year. Her father, who left the family when she was young, is an irresponsible alcoholic, cross-dressing womanizer who might hit her in the head to emphasize a point, and who invited strangers into the home he shared with his unprotected daughter. Neither father nor mother wanted to answer questions about their lives, "If I tell you I'll have to kill you" her father frequently replies. At the age of 30 Sellers starts looking into her family's mental health history because she thinks something genetic could be going on. Both her parents tell her throughout her life that she's not quite right mentally. Her cousin tells her that her aunt didn't leave her house for the last 3 years of her life or her bedroom for the last 1 year; that one family member had to cut a trip to Europe short and return home because of a paranoid episode and that she herself was hospitalized with exhaustion after the birth of her children but she assured Sellers that there was no mental illness in the family. Heather marries an alcoholic libertarian who is divorced from a schizophrenic and refuses to lay down rules for his children because it might give them a complex. This history in itself is enough to set anyone's life careening off into unknown territory.

Added to the uncertainty of her family is Sellers' tendency to get lost in new or newly visited places and her difficulty recognizing people. It takes Sellers 30 years of embarrassment and of having people accuse her of being stuck-up because she ignores them, of kissing the wrong men at parties and being scared when her stepsons confront her in public before she starts searching for a name for her and her mother's difficulties and in a round about way discovers face blindness, prosopagnosia. When she first starts reading about this condition it is described as being very rare, as usually being the result of a stroke or some other trauma to the brain and as effecting only about 100 people in the world. Being a very intelligent person (which is frequently an aspect of prosopagnosia) she does extensive research about the condition and is finally able to find scientists studying the subject who are willing to test her. Viola, she finds she has a severe case. She looks at her husband, closes her eyes and finds she cannot describe either him or herself.

She finds a therapist, certainly a different kind of therapist than the ones she's heard of, because this one gives her advice. He keeps emphasizing that she needs to tell people of her condition. She keeps rejecting that idea. In fact, she decides that what she really needs to do is move to another town, change jobs, be exposed to new people who won't expect her to recognize them.

This is such an excellent book because Sellers is able to describe what it is like to try to understand yourself when you want to be both exactly like and completely different from everyone else. Life is ambiguity and seems to get more ambiguous daily, and Sellers has learned to live with, and even welcome, uncertainty. Oliver Sacks, who also has a genetic form of face blindness, says that the condition effects 2% of the population, Sellers says in some form it effects 1 in 50 people (Jane Goodall has it to a lesser degree). Yet people have to be cajoled into coming out, into letting the rest of the world know of their difficulty. Doesn't that apply to all of us? We want the world to think we're perfect, we're afraid to let others know of our weak spots. Forgiveness is in the subtitle of the book because over the course of her young life, in spite of tremendous difficulties Sellers learns to forgive her very flawed parents, her loving, though almost equally flawed husband, her dismissive stepsons, and herself.

The only problem I have with the book is its cover which shows a busy kind of background with 3 plain faceless cornhusk dolls in the foreground. This is absolutely not what people with face blindness see. The cover should have the dolls dressed in various clothes with different hairstyles and blank faces. The people afflicted notice voice, gait, clothes, and hair - that's the only way they can recognize differences between people.

This is exactly the kind of book I like. Dysfunctional family story PLUS an interesting mental-health type twist. It starts with Heather, her boyfriend Dave, and his kids visiting her parents, who are each strange and difficult in different ways. Dave had been married to a woman who had schizophrenia and his descriptions make Heather wonder if that's what's going on with her mother. There are flashbacks describing her mother's weird behavior (nailing all the windows shut & covering them with blankets, carrying a cardboard box of special objects with her everywhere, etc.). Dave's a Libertarian and seems annoying in some ways (never being willing to impose "limits" by stating what he actually wants) but he and Heather stay friends even after they divorce.

During her research into schizophrenia she learns about prosopagnosia, face blindness. She's always had trouble recognizing people, to an alarming degree, but didn't realize it was an actual disorder. Her family was so chaotic when she was young that nobody recognized she had problems. By this time she's published stories and is a college English teacher, but she's constantly approaching people she thinks she knows who turn out to be strangers, or "ignoring" people she does know. She gets tested at Harvard and learns she does have this disorder. One of the most interesting parts of the book for me was when she had an MRI as part of this process, and a psychiatrist helps her understand her panic attack as only the lizard brain reacting. He helps her watch the fear and get past it.

Somehow this journey helps her to understand and forgive her mother, or at least to establish boundaries with her. Her mother seems pretty damn impossible. Heather also comes out about face-blindness to the campus community. Some people understand, some don't. She just asks that they keep introducing themselves to her, always.

I liked the way she described her slow acceptance that her mother might have real problems, and that she has this condition that has made life so difficult. It's so often like that - slow realization, not a big change that happens one day.

Heather Sellers can't recognize faces. Not just faces of people she knows casually, but her coworkers, her family, her boyfriend and his sons. She has had this problem her entire life, but didn't know she had a problem; she thought everyone processed faces the way she did.

Perhaps Heather didn't realize she had a problem, because there were bigger issues in her family. Her parents had mental health concerns, but as a child, it is hard to recognize that when that is your normal. Her mother was most likely a paranoid schizophrenic; she refused to answer the phone and put blankets up to cover the windows she nailed shut.

Her father left the family, and when Heather could no longer take living with her mother, she moved in with Dad. He secretly wore woman's clothes and had a major drinking problem. How Heather managed to survive living with her parents is a tribute to the strength of the human spirit.

Heather never married, but in her late thirties, she met a wonderful man named Dave, who had two sons, and was divorced from his wife, who had mental illness. Because of his ex-wife, Heather felt that Dave would understand her, and he did. But Dave had issues too.

Heather and Dave eventually married, but they lived in separate homes in the same city because they couldn't agree on purchasing a home. Dave had bad credit problems, and he was rather casual about parenting.

Heather's face recognition issue led to problems at work; she would pass by her colleagues and ignore them because she didn't recognize them. They felt she was snobbish and rude. Imagine the stress of living your whole life constantly afraid that you would run into someone you knew.

Eventually, she dug around and found a diagnosis for her: prosopagnosia. Once she had a diagnosis, she found a doctor who could help her. She appeared on the Today Show, which was a big step for her, admitting her problem to the world at large.

You Don't Look Like Anyone I Know will appeal to fans of Jeanette Walls' The Glass Castle. Both women survived difficult childhoods with mentally ill parents, and because of that, they became strong adults.

Sellers had the added problem of her condition, which she at times feared was a manifestation of mental illness, like her mother's. She writes with brutal honestly about herself, her parents, her boyfriend, and her indomitable spirit shines through.

I admired her ability to basically raise her self and take care of her parents. It must have been difficult to write about her childhood, and she doesn't blame her parents or feel sorry for herself, which is remarkable. I did find her relationship with her husband frustrating, and was glad when she resolved it.

Reading this book made me a little more empathetic to people around me; you just never know what they are going through.