Welcome to my newsletter!

New novel. Donegal tweed yarn. NYC love song.

I know our inboxes are inundated these days, so I appreciate you taking a peek into my life here.

Every two weeks I will send you three things: What I’m Writing, What I’m Knitting, and What’s On My Mind.

Here are the inaugural Three Things!

What I’m Writing:

A fateful decision made in WWI. A college girl who gives up her baby and derails her bright future. A Museum of Tears. My novel The Stolen Child will be published on May 7 and is available for pre-order from your favorite bookseller now.

It took me almost five years to write this story and weave in its threads so that you will not only fall in love with the characters but also be surprised and happy at the end—I hope!

About the title: One day I was feeling blue, something that happens when I miss my mom Gogo, or wish my dad was around to help me make a decision or get hit in the gut with thoughts about my five-year-old daughter Gracie who I lost too soon, and I wondered how many tears I had cried in my life. Gallons? Hogsheads? Barrels? And then I imagined collecting all those tears somehow. And just like that an idea was born. What if I created a character who did collect tears? And started a museum full of them? The Museum of Tears! I typed those words and wrote the opening chapter in which Enzo comes upon the famous opera singer, Luisa Tetrazzini, crying in a park in Naples, Italy and collects her tears. Back at his family’s nativity shop on Via San Gregorio Armeno, he writes down: April 18, 1935. Luisa Tetrazzini. Broken Heart.

And so, the very beginning of a novel takes hold, with the title The Museum of Tears. My very wise team at WW Norton pointed out that there is a trend in titles with The Museum of FILL IN THE BLANK. I imagined a reader going into a bookstore and asking, “I want to buy that book, The Museum of Something,” and buying a different book. I needed a different title.

Above the door of The Museum of Tears hangs a sign with a quote from the W.B. Yeats poem “The Stolen Child”: Come away, O human child! To the waters and the wild/With a faery, hand in hand/For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.

Since there is, in fact, a stolen child in the novel, and this part of the poem is in the novel, and there is weeping in this world, the new, perfect title was obvious. The Stolen Child.

What I’m Knitting:

I have fallen in love with nubby tweed Donegal yarn. As I knit, small bits of different colored fiber—called burrs—pop up, “polka dotting” the yarn, as Purl Soho calls it. I’m knitting a scarf in Hedgerow yarn’s Fuchsia Rose and bought enough Woodpile Gray for a cardigan. About that scarf: Purl Soho’s Fireside Scarf has 7 inches of ribbing on each end, which keeps it from curling up and looks very dramatic.

What’s On My Mind:

New York City! When I moved to a tiny studio apartment on Sullivan Street in Greenwich Village in the early 1980s, I felt like all my cells fell into place. I would never leave! Alas, love and maybe some bad decisions did take me away, though I kept teaching here and sublet various apartments over the years.

But last year, Michael and I moved full time to our 411 square foot apartment in the West Village. (Luckily, I still have my very large loft in Providence when we need space) We spent several years turning it into our home—installing a Murphy bed, hanging our art from Cuba and Mexico and Guatemala, buying pottery in Portugal and Mexico and Italy, adding colorful pillows from Guatemala and Mexico. And bringing Hermia and Gertrude, our two cats along with us. Below, a view from our window on this rainy morning.

It is so good to be back. For example, yesterday we went to Dante’s on Macdougal Street for cocktail expert and writer

Brad Parsons

aperitivo hour—think Negroni sbagliatos in giant wine glasses—then on to the Angelika Film Center to see Zone of Interest (chilling). We finished at Hamburger America (also on Macdougal Street), burger scholar George Motz’s new diner, where we shared a fried onion burger, a classic smash burger all the way, fries, and canned red wine. Fabulous! The rainy night walk home through the romantic Greenwich Village streets and the whiskey and books awaiting us made for a perfect ending to our night.

And…

Speaking of books, I write a roundup of what I’m reading for Michael’s Substack newsletter. Check it out at

Michael Ruhlman