...After smiling brilliantly for nearly four decades, I now find myself trying to quit. Or, at the very least, seeking to lower the wattage a bit…Smiles are not the small and innocuous things they appear to be: Too many of us smile in lieu of showing what's really on our minds…Despite all the work we American women have done to get and maintain full legal control of our bodies, not to mention our destinies, we still don't seem to be fully in charge of a couple of small muscle groups in our faces....

American journalist and essayist. Cunningham studied English at the University of Virginia and has been a freelance writer since she graduated in 1977. She has written on yoga, meditation, spirituality, feminism, and healthy living for magazines such as Glamour, Mademoiselle, Parenting, and the Washington Post Sunday Magazine, as well as for several online journals. She has also written a blog, ChatteringMind, for the Web site Beliefnet.com. See also chatteringmind.com.