SIMON: You - as you note in this memoir, two delightful infants. But I was on a very slow boat to recovery. And to be honest with you, I avoided looking in the mirror for probably a decade. SIMON: What was it like to look in the mirror? Could you look in the mirror? So if there are loud noises - in my case, babies crying loudly - it's a kind of torture at first. What usually muffles your ear is not muffled because of the cranial nerve. The acute onset - you get a really bad headache. It's other stuff - sensitivity to noises, pain. SIMON: And we should underscore - this was a revelation to me - it's not just paralysis. So I thought, either I've had a stroke or this is Bell's palsy. And, indeed, this whole side of my face, the left side, was just completely fallen down.

And she said, no, that's not what I'm talking about. And I said, oh, well, I'm Irish (laughter), you know, thinking of how when we all drink our eyes get a little droopy. And she looked at me and said, your eye looks a little droopy. And the lactation consultant, I remember, was in the corner. RUHL: Well, I had just given birth to twins. SIMON: Quite a phrase you have early on when you talk about all of this beginning to happen. Her book is a meditation on chance, illness, expectation, parenthood, appearance and two elemental reflexes most of us probably don't think much about - smiling and blinking. She shares the story of suffering a sudden paralysis of her face just after giving birth to twins and, of somewhat less importance, having her first play on Broadway. She begins her new memoir by saying, 10 years ago, my smile walked off my face and wandered out in the world. Sarah Ruhl, the playwright, knows how to script a great entrance.

Smile hd