Fortunately, she has always been more comfortable observing than being observed (as befits a playwright) and remarks that by maintaining a demure stillness, she has been partly able to disguise her problem. Above all, she shows how the absence of a smile meddles with the sense of self. She is oppressed by the smile’s place in American (and worldwide) culture, resisting “horrid gleaming white teeth, gloating symmetries”. “Women have been told by men to smile from time immemorial,” she writes. That misgiving does not last: Ruhl’s achievement is in making one see how many questions her condition raises about how we – women in particular – interact with the world and try to appease it with a smile. And yet you might also feel (Ruhl tries to tell herself this) that her paralysis is, after all, not life-threatening – a small affliction in the general scheme of things. Disconcerting, you might concede, not to be able to smile on the red carpet. Ruhl’s face fell just at the point her career was doing the opposite: she had a play transferring to Broadway and had been nominated for a Tony. Charmingly named after the intersection where she and her husband Tony (a child psychiatrist) met in Providence, Rhode Island - “Williams Street and Hope Street” - their twins are called William and Hope.īut it is the Bell’s palsy that fascinates most. She writes vividly about the marathon of early days after birth: “The sleep deprivation when breastfeeding twins can feel like a form of psychosis”, yet she does not neglect to celebrate her children, their joyous existence.

Her account brought back memories (having had twins myself) of an in-body experience that at times seems almost an out-of-body experience, a physical overachievement that doubles as a hitch, a risk, an extravagant burden. Ruhl describes a decade of paralysis but begins with her pregnancy (her second – she has a daughter at pre-school). She was unlucky: for many people, Bell’s palsy passes quickly.

Smile book