100 Essays I Don't Have Time to Write

One hundred incisive, idiosyncratic essays on life and theater from a major American playwright "Don't send your characters to reform school!" pleads Sarah Ruhl in one of her essays. With titles as varied as "On lice," "On sleeping in theaters," and "Motherhood and stools (the furniture kind)," these essays are artful meditations on life in the arts and joyous jumbles of observations on everything in between. The pieces combine admonition, celebration, inquiry, jokes, assignments, entreaties, prayers, and advice honest reflections distilled from years of working in the theater.

They offer candid accounts of what it is like to be a mother and an artist, along with descriptions of how Ruhl's children's dreams, jokes, and songs work themselves into her writing. 100 Essays I Don't Have Time to Write is not just a book about the theater. It is a map of a very particular artistic sensibility and a guide for anyone who has chosen an artist's life.

Ruhl's plays include In the Next Room, or the Vibrator Play (Pulitzer Prize finalist, Tony Award nominee); The Clean House (Pulitzer Prize finalist, Susan Smith Blackburn Prize); Passion Play, a cycle (PEN American Award); Dead Man's Cell Phone (Helen Hayes Award); and, most recently, Stage Kiss and Dear Elizabeth. She has been the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, the Helen Merrill Emerging Playwrights Award, the Whiting Writers' Award, the PEN Center Award for a midcareer playwright, the Feminist Press's Forty Under Forty Award, and the 2010 Lilly Award. She is currently on the faculty at Yale School of Drama and lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her family.