You Don't Look Like Anyone I Know Reading Guide & Discussion Questions

Book Club Discussion Questions

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For supplemental discussion material see our Beyond the Book article, Mental Health and Memoir and our BookBrowse Review of You Don't Look Like Anyone I Know.

Please be aware that this discussion guide will contain spoilers!

1. Sellers struggles, as a child, to find safety with her mother and then with her father. As an adult, in what ways does she comes to terms with each parent's failure to provide that safety and constancy?



2. Sellers' mother constantly checks locked doors, and worries she is being followed. Her father cross-dresses and drinks around the clock. In what ways are her parents alike, and in what key ways are they different?



3. Sellers never finds out the cause of her face blindness. She also never discovers a diagnosis for her father's strange, disturbing behaviors. A major theme running through the book is this: how do we come to know anything for certain, and how do we come to terms with what we will never know about our own families? In your experience, is this a universal truth of growing up?

Unless otherwise stated, this discussion guide is reprinted with the permission of Riverhead Books. Any page references refer to a USA edition of the book, usually the trade paperback version, and may vary in other editions.