# Smile

Canonical: https://www.bookquiver.com/sarah-ruhl/smile/9781529113167

![Smile](https://quivercdn.com/covers/vintage/sarah-ruhl/smile_978-15-2911-316-7-4bdd2d9f.webp?v=2026-10-02%2002%3A53%3A08)

- Book: [Smile](https://www.bookquiver.com/sarah-ruhl/smile) ([Smile.md](https://www.bookquiver.com/sarah-ruhl/smile.md))
- Authors: [Sarah Ruhl](https://www.bookquiver.com/sarah-ruhl)
- Publisher: Vintage
- ISBN: 978-15-2911-316-7
- Pages: 256
- Published: 2022-09-29
- Language: en_GB
- Binding: Softcover

## Description

'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.