Writer with Bell's palsy ponders how to experience joy when expression is limited
Smile records Sarah Ruhl's coming to terms with her new face and the conundrums it presents — after the playwrite wondered for ten years whether the story deserved to live on the page.
Toward the end of her new memoir Smile: The Story of a Face, playwright Sarah Ruhl parses the distinction between the disappointing and the tragic: "Disappointing things were not for the written word, disappointing things were for the stiff upper lip. Tragic things are for the written word, because in tragedy there is catharsis, not slow, incremental, often invisible progress."
The "disappointing thing" here that Ruhl thought for so long did not deserve to live on the page is her ten-year affliction with the idiopathic — spontaneous, unexplained — condition Bell's palsy, which renders the muscles
