Eat, Read, and Be Mommy

Hello again…hello. (Thanks to two of my Idaho roommates and the Idaho boy one of them married, I have a smiling fondness for Neil Diamond.) It’s true I missed two posts there, but it does feel like I filled the time purposefully. The day before Father’s Day we did chores and then had a family outing to NPS before our Saturday night movie; on Father’s Day we feted my hubby, I taught a Sunday School lesson, and we went up to my in-laws’ for dinner; the next day the kids and I went to Logan to visit my niece and her newly-two-year-old. That night my girls were both anxious about leaving for Girls’ Camp the next day, and I wrote a 5 1/2 page letter to my 12-year-old about her fears and what she could do about them. (I also wrote a brief note to my 15-year-old and got to bed later than I wanted to.) They left the next morning–Tuesday–and I’ve been taking my littles where they need to go AND working on cleaning out my son’s room with them both(his little sister’s stuff being mostly still in there).

Last night we went back up to Clearfield for birthday pizza and cake, and then to Draper and then Centerville today (not to mention a sojourn at the bank for PTA purposes in the morning). Tonight, however, my son is having a cousin sleepover of sorts at Grandma’s house, and so I managed more time for other things; this included completing a second journey through Sarah Ruhl’s Smile: The Story of a Face, which I received an ARE of sometime last year and first listened to last November. It embarrasses me that I haven’t written a more timely review, especially since it’s such a lovely book; its depth and the power of Ruhl’s ruminations, however, made the prospect of writing this review intimidating. (To be completely honest with you, I’m tackling it now mostly because it’s a convenient time for me to pass it along to my sister to read, and I don’t pass books on without reviewing.)

I suppose Smile is a memoir–it says so on the cover of at least one edition, as well as in at least one of the back-of-the-book blurbs–and yet it also manages to be both deeply introspective (as opposed to simply narrative) and culturally profound. Ruhl made me think about our society’s view and treatment of a woman’s smile; she made me hurt with empathy for motherhood’s more difficult moments; and she did it in a contemplative literary fashion that avoided actual meandering. (Her profession shows there, of course, playwrights of necessity knowing how to make their individual–and collective–words count.) It took a second journey through it to feel like I could review it, and even now I find it difficult to describe. Ruhl herself, near the end, notes that Smile is a book in which “a woman slowly gets better,” and yet–and yet. After finishing it again tonight, I feel as if a woman whose friendship I valued wrote me a letter encouraging me in my own journey by sharing hers. (I am also humbled by the virtuosity of her intellectual AND emotional expression.) This is a book worth having in your life, and Sarah Ruhl is a woman whose voice contributes–in a truly positive way–to our society.