The playwright, essayist, Macarthur Fellow, and now memoirist Sarah Ruhl is a writer I really love. I got to direct her play In the Next Room (or The Vibrator Play) a few years ago, and her unique combination of insight into the juicy and difficult parts of human relationships, what it truly means to love and grow, and transcendent forgiveness is exactly the kind of play it’s a delight for me to dive into.
My latest experience with her work is her 2021 memoir, Smile: The Story of a Face. In this book, she details her journey with Bell’s palsy, which afflicted her right after she gave birth to twins (they are 11 now).
The book is about the Bell’s palsy, but Ruhl uses her condition as a jumping-off point to explore what it feels like when our inside doesn’t match our outside. She wonders if her half-smile is enough for her babies and her older child, who are still learning about the world through her reaction to it. She writes about the specialists she saw, the years she stopped trying to fix it, and the love and support of the people around her through the process.
Ultimately Ruhl shares that she took so long to write about the palsy because there’s no neat answer at the end of the story. It happened, she worked on it, then she stopped, then she started again, then it started to get better, and it’s all an ongoing process. That kind of story doesn’t fit neatly into a beginning/middle/end formulation, but it does reflect a more real kind of journey.
Most of us can relate to this kind of tale. We begin a process or a project or a recovery. We meander, we regress, we stall. There’s no clear end. We simply keep going.
I listened to the audiobook of Smile, and I really recommend experiencing it that way. Sarah Ruhl reads it herself, and while I don’t always think an author should read their work, she does a fantastic job.
As I was driving and listening to the last two chapters of the book yesterday, I found myself tearing up (okay, I was ugly-crying in the car, I admit it!) The book is really marvelous. I hope you’ll check it out.
