Start gifting
Libro.fm for Business
Start a membership, get two free audiobooks
Almost ready!
In order to save audiobooks to your Wish List you must be signed in to your account.
Log in Create account
Shop the sale
In celebration of Independent Bookstore Day, shop our limited-time sale on bestselling audiobooks from April 22nd-28th. Don’t miss out—purchases support your local bookstore!
Shop nowYou Don’t Look Like Anyone I Know
This audiobook uses AI narration.
We’re taking steps to make sure AI narration is transparent.
Learn moreThis is an unusual and uncommonly moving family memoir, with a twist that gives new meaning to hindsight, insight, and forgiveness.
Heather Sellers is face-blind—that is, she has prosopagnosia, a rare neurological condition that prevents her from reliably recognizing people’s faces. Growing up, unaware of the reason for her perpetual confusion and anxiety, she took what cues she could from speech, hairstyle, and gait. But she sometimes kissed a stranger, thinking he was her boyfriend, or failed to recognize even her own father and mother. She feared she must be crazy.
Yet it was her mother who nailed windows shut and covered them with blankets, made her daughter walk on her knees to spare the carpeting, and had her practice secret words to use in the likely event of abduction. Her father went on weeklong “fishing trips” (a.k.a. benders), took in drifters, and wore panty hose and bras under his regular clothes. Heather clung to a barely coherent story of a “normal” childhood in order to survive the one she had.
That fairy tale unraveled two decades later when Heather took the man she would marry home to meet her parents and began to discover the truth about her family and about herself. As she came at last to trust her own perceptions, she learned the gift of perspective: that embracing the past as it is allows us to let it go. She illuminated a deeper truth—that even in the most flawed circumstances, love may be seen and felt.
Heather Sellers is the author of the story collection Georgia under Water and several books on writing. A poet, essayist, and frequent contributor to O, The Oprah Magazine, the Sun, and other publications, she teaches at Hope College in Holland, Michigan.
Karen White has been narrating audiobooks of all genres since 1999. Honored to be included in AudioFile’s Best Voices, she’s also a four-time Audie Finalist and has earned multiple AudioFile Earphones Awards and Library Journal starred reviews.
Reviews
“Heather Sellers is a glorious writer. You Don’t Look Like Anyone I Know is an astonishing book.”
“A powerfully moving account of childhood lost and regained.”
“A brilliant memoir that is part love story, part detective work. Having learned to negotiate the territory between what we see, what we think we see, and what we miss, this wonderful writer manages to capture the pain and the joy found in the mysteries of mind and heart. A fascinating, disturbing journey, by turns hilarious and heartbreaking.”
“The new memoir by Heather Sellers is so accomplished…the story it tells is so exotic and yet somehow so familiar, too, and…the writing is so poetic yet never feels forced or fussed-over…The book has just that sort of seamless, fluid, effortless feel. As you read, it’s as if Sellers is right there in the room with you, telling her life story with high good humor, casual eloquence, and piercing insight.”
“Narrator Karen White does an admirable job giving voice to Sellers’ chaotic life. Such a story—of marriage and divorce, a schizophrenic mother and an alcoholic father, along with Heather’s inability to recognize people’s facial features—could easily be presented in an overdramatic manner. Instead of succumbing to this pitfall, White manages to imbue Sellers’ words with appropriate emotion. Her skillful narration communicates the turmoil that Sellers has endured. Author and narrator will have listeners hanging on every word.”
“As a writer (if not in her messy life), Sellers is confident, a master of her craft. Her memoir is paced like a work of suspenseful fiction, moving back and forth between her childhood and her present-day quest to uncover the truth about herself and her family…Despite the dire subject matter, Sellers’ writing is sprightly, even funny; this is a memoir to be devoured in great chunks. The pleasure of reading it derives both from its graceful style and from its ultimate lesson: that seeing our past for what it really was, and forgiving those involved, frees us up to love them all the more, despite their (and our) limitations.”
Expand reviews