Letters From Max: A Book of Friendship

This book, made of letters, is a love letter itself. Not just from Sarah Ruhl to Max Ritvo, but to friendship itself. A true friend is a rare thing – not just someone whose company you enjoy, but someone who irrevocably changes your life for the better, who leaves their mark on your very soul. It is even more precious when two artists find each other in this way, as Sarah and Max did. They met when Sarah was Max’s student at Yale, but as any educator will know, our students frequently end up teaching us far more than we teach them (sometimes clichés are true for a reason), and Max was no exception. Over the next four years, the writing they inspired in one another is a true gift, one that we, the readers, are privileged enough to witness through their correspondence.

For example, from Max:

“Everything in my life, the fabric of my life itself, is dissolving. You are not. Maybe I am not? That’s what your letter meant to me.”

And from Sarah:

“Courage, I say, 
is you, 
Max.

In your wild suit
your small boat
and terrible forest 

a man overnight
no boy
could ever scale those walls.

You come home
and dinner is waiting,
still waiting I hope, still warm.”

Grief and loss touch so many aspects of their story, and Sarah does not shy away from that in her retelling. It is an unflinching portrayal of the deep injustice of death approaching when one’s life has barely begun, when there is still so much more to say. Max passed away after his battle with cancer when he was just twenty-five years old. There is no way to spin that as anything but what it was: a heartbreaking loss. But in all her work, Sarah has an immense ability to provide us with hope, even within the darkest of moments, and with truth. This is not a sentimental tear-jerker of an illness narrative. It is honest. It is real. We see Max’s humor, his passion, his talent, and the joy he brought to everyone he met shine through the pages of this book. He did not waste one second of his (to borrow another poet’s turn of phrase) one wild and precious life, creating a truly exceptional body of work to leave the world before he left it far too soon. And now Sarah has given us yet another gift: Max’s memory becomes a living, breathing thing in her new play adaptation of Letters From Max, which the Poetry Foundation has the great privilege of presenting to the public later this month, following its off-Broadway premiere in 2023.

I could go on and on about my love for this beautiful book and my excitement for its new incarnation, but instead, I’ll leave you with a beloved quote from Sarah’s poem, “Lunch with Max on the Upper East Side,” which first appeared in Letters From Max and was later published in her debut poetry collection, 44 Poems for You (Copper Canyon Press, 2020):

“Max is a poet.
Max is a poem.
We all become poems
in the end.”

A reading of Sarah Ruhl’s adaptation of Letters from Max will be performed at the Poetry Foundation at 2:00 PM CDT on June 29th, 2024. More details and registration information for this event can be found here.