This is an excellent book!  Readable, engaging, interesting, informative, and ultimately uplifting and satisfying.

Ruhl is the award winning playwright of Eurydice, The Clean House, and In the Next Room, a Yale professor, and a MacArthur and Whiting award recipient.  Her world was moving along with success after success until 10 years ago when she delivered twins and shortly after that noticed that the right side of her face was immobile.  She had Bell’s Palsy, and the book addresses the resultant changes in her life and in her understanding of what was important and what was not.

It took me a while to figure out why I was so engaged with this story.  Perhaps it was Ruhl’s Midwest/Chicago area roots in Wilmette/Evanston, her attending Brown, her marriage to a doctor, or the fact that my wife dealt with Bell’s Palsy as has a close friend of ours, but I finally concluded that it was Ruhl’s writing style that did it.  As a playwright, she naturally settles into a style that is basically conversational.  Reading her book felt like sitting with her at a restaurant and discussing life.

The book is worth reading for anyone who has struggled with the ‘presentation of self in everyday life’ as an old college book author, Irving Goffman, entitled his book.  Reading other’s faces while they read ours is a basic evolutionary skill that was essential for survival, but why do we continue to put such emphasis on appearance, looks, the face?  Ruhl finds some answers in unsurprising places (e.g. Buddhist mediation, friends, some of her doctors) and other answers in surprising ones (e.g. chiropractor, acupuncturist, the Alexander Technique).  Her journey is brilliantly paced and told.

Highly recommended.