review: you don't look like anyone i know by heather sellers

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College professor Heather Sellers sometimes affectionately greets men who aren’t her fiancé (later husband) and is frequently accused of rudely blowing off people she should know. Sellers knows there is some sort of problem, but her focus is on a multitude of other issues including that her mother is likely suffering from undiagnosed schizophrenia and that the man she will marry in the course of this memoir is likely an alcoholic (and her father probably is as well). Unfortunately, the fact that Sellers is dealing with all these different things causes You Don’t Look Like Anyone I Know to feel scattered as the narration jumps between past and present and back again. There is a diary-like feel with unnecessary anecdotes about her stepsons (whose privacy I wonder about, especially since Sellers says at the end that she left her brother out to protect his privacy) and repetitive stories about her childhood. By the time Sellers finally receives her diagnosis of prosopagnosia (face blindness), she is making a number of reaches to blame someone (she obsessively tries to find a connection between schizophrenia and prosopagnosia) or something for the various problems in her life. Her inability to anticipate problems (such as when she attempts to have her parents meet her fiancé and his children) and convoluted storytelling eclipse the important details of how hard it was to be diagnosed (some doctors dismiss her concerns) and subsequent issues that arise from trying to explain the condition to colleagues.
3/5
Review copy provided by the publisher, Riverhead Books.