Smile

The Story of a Face

Sarah Ruhl

$24.99

Paperback

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English

Vintage
29 October 2022

Autobiography: literary; Memoirs; Coping with illness

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.

By: Sarah Ruhl
Imprint: Vintage
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 198mm, Width: 130mm, Spine: 17mm
Weight: 210g
ISBN: 9781529113167
ISBN 10: 1529113164
Pages: 256
Publication Date: 29 October 2022
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

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 received many awards and is 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, internationally, and have been translated into many languages. Her books include 100 Essays I Don't Have Time to Write, Letters from Max, with Max Ritvo, and 44 Poems for You. 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. SarahRuhlPlaywright.com

Reviews for Smile: The Story of a Face

I bet everyone reading this has had difficulty expressing an internal reality. Now imagine an affliction that separates the two physically. 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 * With a poet's sharp eye for detail and a playwright's grasp of both the tragic and the absurd, 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 * 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 * I'm now accustomed to Sarah's whipping out profound and necessary books that I can't put down even when I smell dinner burning, but I guess I wasn't prepared for her book about Bell's Palsy to provide some of the most deeply romantic passages about married love I have ever read. I smiled, for sure, but I also swooned and ached and was left with goose-flesh more than once. I adore this book * Mary Louise Parker, New York Times bestselling author of Dear Mr. You * Smile is staggeringly great... All of us have disappointments that we try to keep secret because we're ashamed and want to be above them. We are not above them. And Smile speaks to this predicament with extreme insight -- Beth Henley, author of Crimes of the Heart