The Book by Mary Ruefle Review by Donna Vatnick

The Book by Mary Ruefle

Review by Donna Vatnick

Publisher: Wave Books

Publication Date: September 2023, re-release March 2025

ISBN: 978-1-950268-84-9

Pages: 112

“We were in our thirties and considered ourselves grown-ups, adults,” writes Mary Ruefle in her latest book, simply titled The Book. Reading this in my thirties, I feel apprehended. Everything I imagined would last forever, despite knowing better, is beginning to vanish. Being a grown-up has meant dreaming of my teeth falling out at least twice a week. But Ruefle humbles the spiral of doom with a hard-earned perspective. She continues, “Later I found out that I was not grown-up at thirty, but he never found out, he died before he could find out he wasn’t a grown-up.” 

Anyone who has read Ruefle knows that she has a way of getting inside you. Having authored dozens of books including Dunce, My Private Property, and Madness, Rack, and Honey Collected Lectures, The Book explores the bittersweetness of getting older. “Dear friends,” she writes in her dedication, “this is for you.” In a whirlwind of people and places, Vermont’s solitude-loving poet laureate paints a picture of a life lived in the company of many others. At seventy-two, she offers grown-ups and not-yet-grown-ups alike a lifeline to eavesdrop on her memories and find some relief within our own.

The Book is a heavy title for such a slim volume of thirty-nine short prose pieces. Ruefle begins it with an almost pious echo of Genesis, “I was in the beginning named after someone else who was named Mary but I was neither this person nor the one they called Mary after her, I was nameless, and in this state I perpetually wandered among fruit and flowers and foliage….” We can almost hear the familiar “And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.” Stripping away her own name, “Untitled” sets the tone for what follows, allowing us to reimagine a world in which names are inventions and identities can be easily unraveled. They will be unraveled, whether we like it or not. 

As The Book itself unravels into field notes, koans, and unstructured haikus that re-enact the experience of age, Ruefle unflinchingly approaches unanswerable questions in her typical playful way. In “The Wrapped Book,” a Swiss bookstore’s practice of wrapping sold books as gifts becomes her own ritual of saving surprises for her future self. Now, many years later, the wrapped book becomes more than a book—it becomes an expectation, an accident of thinking that things saved for later have any kind of permanence. “I know when I wrapped the book it seemed perfect to me,” she writes, “but times have changed and I have changed and all my hopes have been redirected. It seems I believe in a bygone world though I no longer live there.” 

Ruefle, who famously sticks to snail-mail and writes sans computer, is talking about more than the ‘bygone’ world. Throughout The Book, she grapples with our culture’s avoidance of the elder and pays close attention to the growing invisibility of her experience. Like Simone de Beauvoir’s The Coming Age, she contemplates the frustrations of keeping aging a shameful secret. In her piece “Chilly Observation,” Ruefle writes: 

“Do you know the story of the woman who went to a taverna in Greece, her table was set on the beach, after a while the tide came in, the water covered her legs and the legs of the table and the waiter continued to serve her, going back and forth from the kitchen as if nothing were happening? People often wonder what it is like to be old, but a few actually ask.” 

Such pieces—small but mighty—make up the body of The Book. Its backbone, however, is a twenty-three page centerpiece that harkens back to her dedication note. She begins the piece, titled “Dear Friends,” with the pedestrian observation that friends on Facebook are not your real friends. But on the same page, she suddenly switches to a clear thesis: 

“As Frances Burnett wrote, there are only a few times in life when we think we are going to live forever. And I think one of them is when we are with our friends, laughing, eating, looking each other in the eye.” 

Ruefle doesn’t reinvent the literature of friendship but improvises upon it. Khalil Gibran, Ursula Le Guin, Bertrand Russell, Margaret Atwood, Henry Miller, and countless others have trodden this road before. In the realm of the hopeful, Simone Weil wrote in a letter to her friend that one may love the distance between friends, because those “who do not love each other are not separated.” In the realm of grief, the pastoral poet Francis Jammes, whose elegiac lines introduce The Book—”They’re gone now. It makes me sad to think about it.”—becomes a mood that emerges in Ruefle’s own pages.

Her prose, as usual, is enviably simple. Sentences are at times rhythmic, and other times breathless. She slides between poem and essay, beginning each line with “I have/had a friend who…” The friend who peeled an orange in public, the friend who she took swimming after he went blind, the friend who believed birds have souls but humans don’t, the friend who only eats white food, the friends she partied with even though she “no longer remembers what that feels like.” These moments are rife with shared correspondences, confessions, and disappointments. She often punctuates the piece with reminders of her loss, “Two of the friends I’ve written about here have died since writing this.” 

I found myself returning to “Dear Friends” again and again. All those earworms—evocative lines that reminded me of the friends who began to die, or give birth, or disappear, or transform, or grow away, or return, or disappoint or surprise. These little sparks made me reach for the pen and write their names and their quirks, scars, memories in cities that neither of us live in anymore. Keeping a record is a reprieve from the grand sweep of nihilism. It made me want to write letters, and say I love you because you never know. 

Ruefle’s decision to give this book the weight of embodying “the book” feels deliberate. There’s something final about it. An ode to books themselves, The Book finds refuge in other writers as much as it does in friendships. Ruefle nods to William Carlos Williams, Lydia Davis, Carl Jung, the Zen master Ikkyu, among many others. In her titular piece “The Book,” she wonders what will happen to all her books when she dies. She’s heartbroken that her beloved books will be dispersed, that they will never again be cover-to-cover with each other. 

I look at The Book on my own bedside, pressed between Cynthia Ozick and Kim Stanley Robinson, and wonder where else in the world this exact sequence of bonds has arranged itself. I think of these three thinkers convening into the night with their chilly observations side-by-side, yet another accident of friendship. One day, the books will be lonely again but will be found by readers who will say as Ruefle writes, “Old friend, you were written especially for me.” 

Mary Ruefle is an acclaimed poet and writer whose book Dunce was a 2020 Pulitzer Prize finalist. She has published multiple award-winning works including Madness, Rack, and Honey and Selected Poems. Ruefle is also an erasure artist and has received prestigious honors like a Guggenheim fellowship and an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She currently serves as Vermont’s poet laureate.

Donna Vatnick is an essayist and songwriter based in Providence, Rhode Island. She was the Senior Writing Fellow at Washington University in St. Louis after graduating with her MFA in nonfiction. Her work has appeared in the Los Angeles Review, The Millions, and more. 

9 July 2025