Ruff was born in
Brooklyn, New York City, in 1965, to a
Lutheran family of
German ancestry. At the age of 5, he decided he wanted to be a fiction writer. He spent his childhood and adolescence learning how to tell stories. Ruff's first sustained effort at a novel was a soap opera–like story about a family with a lot of children (having only older half siblings, Ruff was fascinated by the concept of siblings). He wrote it in the 1970s, but never published it. Describing it, Ruff said "Think
Eight Is Enough with
surreal elements. There was no overall plot, just a series of loosely linked episodes—a chapter about the boys and girls digging competing tunnel systems under the house would be followed by one in which they got infected by some weird flu strain and started passing out in the halls. Periodically I’d set aside what I’d written and start the whole thing over again". During Ruff's last semester at
Cornell University, his mother died. He graduated in 1987. One of Ruff's English professors had been
Alison Lurie, who helped Ruff find an agent. His father died after Ruff's first novel was published. ==Unpublished novels==