Smile
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  • Published: 20 January 2022
  • ISBN: 9781473579309
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 256

Smile

The Story of a Face

Formats & editions
EBook
20 Jan 2022
Audiobook
20 Jan 2022
Paperback
29 Oct 2022
Hardback
13 Feb 2022
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An extraordinary memoir about what it means to be a writer, a woman and a mother with Bell's Palsy by award-winning playwright

'Her story is intimate and revealing about what it is to smile and what it means when you can't' Cynthia Nixon

The extraordinary story of one woman's ten-year odyssey that brought her physical, creative, emotional, and spiritual healing.

With a play opening on Broadway, and every reason to smile, Sarah Ruhl has just survived a high-risk pregnancy when she discovers the left side of her face is completely paralyzed. She is assured that 90 percent of Bell's palsy patients experience a full recovery, like her own mother. But Sarah is in the unlucky ten percent. And for a woman, wife, mother, and artist working in theatre, the paralysis and the disconnect between the interior and exterior brings significant and specific challenges. So she begins an intense decade-long search for a cure while simultaneously grappling with the reality of her new face - one that, while recognisably her own, is incapable of accurately communicating feelings or intentions.

Smile is Ruhl's piercing, witty, lucid chronicle of her journey. She explores the struggle of a body yearning to match its inner landscape, the pain of postpartum depression, the story of a marriage, being a playwright and working mother to three small children, and the desire for a resilient spiritual life in the face of illness.

Brimming with insight, humility, warmth and humour, Smile is a triumph: an intimate examination of loss and reconciliation, and above all else, the importance of perseverance and hope in the face of adversity.
  • Published: 20 January 2022
  • ISBN: 9781473579309
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 256
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About the author

Sarah Ruhl

Sarah Ruhl is a playwright and writer of other things. Her fifteen plays include In the Next Room (or the Vibrator Play), The Clean House, and Eurydice. She has been a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, a Tony Award nominee, and the recipient of the MacArthur "genius" Fellowship. Her plays have been produced on- and off-Broadway, around the country, internationally, and have been translated into many languages. Her book 100 Essays I Don't Have Time to Write was a New York Times Notable Book. Her other books include Letters from Max, with Max Ritvo, and 44 Poems for You. She has received the Steinberg Playwright Award, the Samuel French Award, Feminist Press Under 40 Award, the National Theater Conference Person of the Year Award, the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, a Whiting Award, a Lily Award, and a PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater Award for mid-career playwrights. She teaches at the Yale School of Drama, and she lives in Brooklyn with her husband, Tony Charuvastra, who is a child psychiatrist, and her three children. You can read more about her work at SarahRuhlPlaywright.com

Praise for Smile

Ruhl proves that even life at its most mundane can be fascinating. This incredibly inspiring story offers hope where it's least expected

Publisher’s Weekly, starred review

A captivating, insightful memoir

Kirkus, starred review

Sarah Ruhl has written a remarkable book. Smile is at once a gripping story and a profound exploration of the mysteries of illness. I know of nothing like it

James Shapiro, author of Shakespeare in a Divided America

Profound and necessary. I adore this book

Mary Louise Parker, New York Times bestselling author of Dear Mr. You

Ravishing ... that rare and gorgeous melding of gemlike, literary insights, raw honesty, heart break and radiant wisdom. It took my breath away. For real

V (formerly Eve Ensler), author of I Am an Emotional Creature, The Vagina Monologues and The Apology

With poignancy and power, Smile helps us all to find ways of expressing our internal truth. It helped me to both learn and grow

Gloria Steinem, author of My Life on the Road

Staggeringly great...

Beth Henley, author of Crimes of the Heart

This book serves as a welcome invitation to worry about it all a little less, and smile a little more

Alice O'Keeffe, Guardian

Extraordinary... smart, quipping, pacy... a practical investigation that explores how, when half your face goes on strike, new ways have to be found to do a smile's work

Kate Kellaway, Observer

Although we come to know Ruhl's courage, intelligence and humour, Smile seems not really a book about Ruhl herself, or Bell's palsy either, but an appeal for some acceptance of what is, for each of us

Sheena Joughin, Times Literary Supplement

The best book I've read in the past year is Smile: The Story of a Face by playwright Sarah Ruhl... intimate and revealing... touched me deeply.

Cynthia Nixon
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