Letters from Max : A Book of Friendship

In 2012, Sarah Ruhl opened an application for a playwriting class she was teaching at Yale University: Dear Professor Ruhl, Thanks for reading this application. My name is Max Ritvo—I’m a senior English major in the Creative Writing Concentration. All I want to do is write.

Ruhl was a distinguished, two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist; Ritvo was an exuberant, opinionated, intensely curious and intensely gifted poet in remission from pediatric cancer. But after Ritvo’s illness returned that semester, the two began to trade e-mails, letters, and texts.

Over the four years that followed—as Ritvo’s health continued to decline, even as his productivity bloomed—the teacher found herself becoming first a friend, then a colleague, and finally a student. Reincarnation, the loving playfulness of postmodernism, the afterlife as an Amtrak quiet car, good soup: in Ruhl and Ritvo’s exchanges, all ideas are fair, nourishing game, shared and debated in the spirit of generosity and love. “We’ll always know one another forever, however long ever is,” Ritvo writes. “And that’s all I want—is to know you forever.”

Studded with poems and songs, shimmering like stars set in the heavy blanket of the sky, Letters from Max is a deeply moving exploration of love, art, mortality, and joy.