Hello Stranger: A Novel

Center’s story examines how much human understanding of oneself and others is tied to physical appearances and challenges this superficiality. Through Sadie’s struggle with recognizing faces, she must explore identity more complexly, focusing on inner qualities, emotional connections, and negative self-perception. Sadie’s inability to recognize faces is the primary vehicle for the novel’s investigation into how people construct identity. As a portrait artist, Sadie prides herself on her ability to capture the essence of individuals through their faces: “[…] I can never look at a face for the first time without mentally assessing it for its shapes and structure and most compelling features […]” (9). Even when not painting, she judges others’ faces as ideal or supremely proportionate. The sudden onset of prosopagnosia destabilizes her, not only professionally but also personally, as she must rely on her other senses to distinguish between people. Her struggle with face blindness mirrors a deeper challenge within Sadie of how she “sees" people and how she must reconstruct her sense of self when her medical condition strips the most recognizable and defining features away.

Sadie’s condition means navigating the world without the familiar appearance cues, forcing her to redefine how she perceives and interacts with others. In a literal sense, she must rely on non-visual cues to identify people, such as voices, mannerisms, and emotions. This shift in perception becomes a metaphor for moving beyond surface-level judgments based on looks. The people in Sadie’s life, especially Joe (who the novel later reveals is Dr. Addison), become more meaningful to her as she learns to connect with them emotionally first. The discrepancy between how Sadie perceives him and who he is underscores the novel’s argument that external appearances often cloud proper understanding. Moreover, she learns that she misjudges people based on their appearance, as exemplified by her assuming “Busty McGee,” Dr. Michaux, sleeps around because she has large breasts. Sadie realizes that appearances can be misleading or incomplete, and she projects certain beliefs about others based solely on their external appearance, not on their worth as humans. 

Moreover, the novel explores Sadie’s identity crisis as she encounters her new reality. Seeing faces as mixed-up jigsaw puzzle pieces symbolizes Sadie’s fractured identity as she struggles to reconcile her past self with her present self, whose professional and personal identity are crumbling. The mirror scenes, where Sadie can’t see her reflection, further symbolize her internal struggle with identity. She expresses her fear, “No matter how alone you ever are in life, you always have yourself, right? You always have that goofy, imperfect face […]” (45). Her face, once a clear symbol of who she was, and her life becomes a puzzle, and she cannot piece it together. Only when she learns to look beyond the physical and embraces her new circumstances does she begin to rediscover her sense of self. Thus, Center uses prosopagnosia as a lens to challenge and critique the reliance on external appearances as identity markers. Sadie’s epiphany comes when she recognizes that identity, of both self and others, lies beneath the surface. In a world where external appearances are idolized, Sadie resolves to look deeper and form connections based on emotional depth and authenticity rather than surface-level assumptions, which are often entirely misguided.