Heather Sellers, You Don't Look Like Anyone I Know: A True Story of Family, Face Blindness, and Forgiveness. This memoir by a woman with prosopagnosia describes her lifelong struggle with face blindness, including how it impacts her relationship with her own family. While it is a true story, Sellers’ emotional perspective on recognizing people by context rather than appearance closely relates to your query. "This condition impacts every aspect of my life". This survey, published in PLOS, directly studied the real-world experiences of adults with developmental prosopagnosia. It notes that while a majority of respondents could recognize immediate family, 35% reported being unable to reliably recognize immediate family members out of context. This study directly validates the phenomenon you describe in a real-world setting.
The works of Oliver Sacks: Though not focusing specifically on this combination, the late neurologist Oliver Sacks famously wrote case histories of individuals with unusual neurological conditions. His book The Mind's Eye explores various visual perception issues, including some that affect recognition and may resonate with the issues of context and identity. Fiction that incorporates similar themes
While a direct portrayal is rare, some fictional works explore elements of this human condition: Jennifer Niven, Holding Up the Universe. The protagonist of this young adult novel, Libby Strout, lives with extreme prosopagnosia and must navigate a world where she cannot recognize faces. While it does not delve deeply into the "emotional overload" aspect, it explores the deep social anxiety and isolation that comes from navigating relationships while having face blindness.
Alice Feeney, Rock Paper Scissors. This mystery novel involves characters whose memories and perceptions of each other are deeply unreliable. While not explicitly about prosopagnosia or context blindness, the novel heavily uses the unreliability of perception and memory in close relationships as a core plot device, which resonates with your description. Laura Ruby, Bone Gap. This fantasy novel features a main character who suffers from a context-driven inability to recognize faces. While it is framed in a magical realist setting, the story powerfully illustrates the challenge of knowing and loving someone whose identity is tied more to a story or feeling than their physical appearance. The neurodivergent literature landscape