SMILE

A diligent search for self through years of affliction.

Award-winning playwright Ruhl, a MacArthur fellow and two-time Pulitzer finalist, was pregnant when she opened a fortune cookie that contained a cryptic message: “Deliver that what is inside you, and it will save your life.” What was inside her turned out to be much more than fraternal twins. In a wise, intimate, and moving memoir, the author recounts a decade of illness, recovery, and self-transformation that followed her pregnancy. It began the day after delivering the twins, when the left side of her face became paralyzed; she had developed Bell’s palsy, a rare condition of nerve damage. She could not blink her left eye and, equally devastating, she could not smile. Although most people recover from Bell’s palsy within months, Ruhl’s persisted, causing not only physical discomforts—she had trouble eating and enunciating—but psychological and emotional distress. “Is the self the face?” she wondered as she became increasingly depressed at the facial asymmetry that seemed to her so “ugly.” Although she had considered herself a person of little vanity, now she “veered dangerously close to self-pity” and also self-blame for not getting better. Ruhl engagingly reports on her interactions with a host of therapists and medical practitioners—some brusque and dismissive, some caring and helpful; she even sought advice from a Tibetan lama. Sometimes, she admits, “I felt like anatomy rather than a whole.” A positive test for celiac disease helped to explain why nerve growth was inhibited, but it still took years before she could produce a semblance of a smile. Within her chronicle of illness, the author deftly weaves memories of her father; thoughts about motherhood, friendship, writing; and perceptive reflections about the meaning of smiling, especially for women. “I thought I could not truly reenter the world until I could smile again,” she writes; “and yet, how could I be happy enough to smile again when I couldn’t reenter the world?”

A captivating, insightful memoir.