Sarah Ruhl Will Release Memoir Called 'Smile'

According to The New York Times, playwright Sarah Ruhl will release a memoir, titled 'Smile'.

The book will explore Ruhl's struggle with Bell's palsy, a condition that caused paralysis in the life side of her face. The memoir will also talk about Ruhl's experiences with postpartum depression and her life in the theater, as well as topics like faith, beauty, art and family.

Ruhl says that the book is :a confluence of, in my own life, wanting to move past a difficult nine years of navigating the health system, navigating the kind of limits of my own body, and then also thinking about women smiling culturally in general."

She called the condition "a disappointment but it's not a tragedy" and she hopes that it will shed light on "an outlier experience of motherhood, but hopefully a path forward that has some sense of humor and hope about healing."

Read more on The New York Times.

Sarah Ruhl's plays include How to Transcend a Happy Marriage; For Peter Pan on Her 70th Birthday, The Oldest Boy, In the Next Room: or The Vibrator Play (Pulitzer Prize finalist, Tony Award nominee for best play); The Clean House (Pulitzer Prize Finalist, The Susan Smith Blackburn Prize); Passion Play (Pen American award, The Fourth Freedom Forum Playwriting Award from The Kennedy Center); Orlando, Late: A Cowboy Song, Dear Elizabeth, Dead Man's Cell Phone, Eurydice and Stage Kiss. Her plays have been produced on Broadway at the Lyceum by Lincoln Center Theater, off-Broadway at Playwrights Horizons, Second Stage, and at Lincoln Center's Mitzi Newhouse Theater. Her plays have been produced regionally all over the country and have also been produced internationally and have been translated into more than ten languages. Ruhl received her MFA from Brown University where she studied with Paula Vogel. She has received the Steinberg Distinguished Playwright award, the Susan Smith Blackburn award, the Whiting award, the Lily Award, a PEN award for mid-career playwrights, and the MacArthur "Genius" award. Her book of essays, 100 Essays I Don't Have Time to Write, was published by Faber and Faber was a Times Notable Book of the Year. She teaches at the Yale School of Drama and lives in Brooklyn with her family.