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63
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
59/100Critics
67/100Scholars
Author:
Sarah Ruhl
Publisher:
Simon Schuster
Date:
October 5, 2021
Happily married and in the flush of hard-earned professional success, with her first play opening on Broadway, Sarah Ruhl has just survived a high-risk pregnancy and given birth to twins when she discovers the left side of her face entirely paralyzed. Bell's palsy. Ninety percent of Bell's palsy sufferers see spontaneous improvement and full recovery, but Sarah Ruhl is in the unlucky ten percent.
What The Reviewers Say
In her thoughtful and moving memoir Smile, Ruhl reminds us that a smile is not just a smile but a vital form of communication, of bonding, of what makes us human.
... to run into an illness memoir that one would call 'delightful' would seem to be a rare occurrence. Yet I just read... Smile.
Some sections of this slim book may feel padded (unless you’re riveted by the subject of gluten), and Ruhl’s detective work into her family medical history is speculative enough to feel tangential.
Ruhl makes many interesting observations on the wider significance of smiles, from strangers in the street demanding that women should smile, to the frozen statue of Hermione in The Winter’s Tale. But she wears her academic hat lightly, skipping easily from Shakespeare back to the chaos of her family life, in which theatre rewrites are cut short because all three children are vomiting. This is a book about far more than smiles: some of the most touching sections look back at Ruhl’s childhood, and the experiences that propelled her into theatre. The tale of a health condition is, more interestingly, the tale of the person it afflicts.
