Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This is Fresh Air. I'm Tanya Mosley, and my guest today is Mitch Albom. It was 30 years ago that he wrote Tuesdays with Maury, a tender, true story about the lessons he learned from his old college professor, Maury Schwartz, who died of ALS. The book became one of the best-selling memoirs of all time, with its simple but profound reflections on living.
and that experience set Albom on a path he's walked ever since, writing stories about love and loss and the search for meaning in the face of mortality.
Chapter 2: What inspired Mitch Albom to write his new novel Twice?
His latest novel, Twice, starts with a question most of us have probably daydreamed about. What if you had the power to redo any moment of your life? In the book, a man named Alfie is born with the ability to go back and relive any moment he chooses. But with every second chance comes a cost. He can't change matters of the heart, and he can't stop someone from dying when it's their time.
Since Tuesdays with Maury, Albom has written eight bestsellers, including The Five People You Meet in Heaven and The Stranger in the Lifeboat, many of which have been adapted for stage and screen. He's also been a sports columnist for the Detroit Free Press for over 40 years. But those visits with Maury didn't just shape the writer Albom became. They also changed how he moved through the world.
Maury once told him that giving makes you feel more alive than taking. a lesson Albom took to heart. He runs nine charities in Detroit that supports veterans, students, and people in need of housing and medical care. And for the past 15 years, he's also operated an orphanage in Haiti. Mitch Albom, welcome to Fresh Air.
Thank you for having me.
Okay, so Mitch, in this book, Alfie has this incredible ability. He can go back and relive any moment of his life. And he uses it in the way that we all would expect to use it if we had this power, especially when he was a kid. He used it to stop bullies, to impress girls. But as he gets older, this power becomes more complicated.
What drew you to write about the darker side of this kind of fantasy?
Yeah.
Probably just getting older. I think when you're younger, if you want to try something different, you do. You want to switch your career, you do it. You want to switch who you're dating, you do it. You want to move to another country, you do it. But I noticed as people get older... concrete settles a little bit more and it's harder to just switch out.
And so those would-be switches start to turn into regrets. And then they start to turn into that question in your head, if only I had taken that job, if only I had moved to that country, if only I had picked that different person to marry. And so I realized that this is probably a pretty universal theme.
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Chapter 3: What are the consequences of reliving moments in life according to Twice?
And I wanted to explore what would happen if you actually had the ability to do that and not to time travel 15 different times and do it over again. That seemed kind of pointless. But you get one more crack at it. Would that second crack... really be better, or would it just bring with it a whole new set of circumstances? And as Alfie gets older, that's what he starts to discover.
And then he also learns of one particular caveat with the power that he didn't know about, and that is that it doesn't work with love. And if you turn your back on a true love to try to go find somebody else, that person can never love you again. They'll be in the world, you can know them, but they'll never feel the same way about you. And so this power comes with that consequence as well.
And of course, as you can imagine, since I'm a writer, he has to make a very fateful decision at one point in the book, and I'll sort of leave it there.
So the rules are clear. You can't make someone love you twice. There's also a second rule here. You also can't change when a person will die. So basically, love and mortality are the two unchangeable forces. What made you choose those particular limits?
Well, mortality... That was easy because you can't change mortality. And in fact, he discovers this at the beginning of the book when he first discovers his power because he's eight years old. He doesn't know he has this power. He's in Africa with his parents who are missionaries. His mother gets sick. She's in bed. And he goes out to play.
Instead of sitting with her, his father wants him to sit with her, but his father leaves and he says, well, she's sleeping. You know, why do I? I'm eight years old. I just go out and play. So he goes out and plays. And while he's out playing, she dies. And when he comes back in, he realizes he he missed her death and he was playing and he's so upset and he's so angry with himself.
And he's so, you know, and through the course of the night, he sort of like engenders this power. He brings it upon him and he wakes up the next morning and it's the day before.
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Chapter 4: How did Mitch Albom's relationship with Morrie Schwartz influence his writing?
And... his mother is still alive in bed and he goes, this time he goes and he sits with her and she opens her eyes and she sees him and they have a last discussion together. And she tells him all the things that he loves, that she loves about him. She says, sit here, let me, because she realizes he has this power.
She says, sit here before I, before I die, let me tell you all the things I love about you. But he still can't change the fact that she dies. And he ultimately ends up saying that, you know, He was playing Superman when she died, and he writes a sentence, my mother died while I was trying to fly. And, Tanya, I actually wrote that because my mother died while I was on an airplane.
I had just gone to visit her in California. She had died. had a stroke and couldn't talk. And I missed having the last conversation with her because no one knew, of course, a stroke was coming. And then all of a sudden she couldn't talk anymore. And so we were, for months, we just were sitting with each other and looking at each other and that type of thing.
And I had gotten on a plane to fly somewhere. And when I landed, my brother called me and said, mom died. you know, while you were flying. And so that scene to me was very poignant. And for all my wishing, I knew I couldn't make her come back. So the whole idea of being able to change mortality was kind of inside me already. And I wanted my character to have that limit too.
The second part of your question, why love? That's deliberate because I believe that And the point that I wanted to make with Twice was that love is different than... It's not the last shot of a basketball game. You don't go back and just change the play, get the ball a little differently, throw it in, the ball goes in instead of missing, you win the game, done.
Love starts with the ignition, but you have to keep it going. And it is, to me... The hundredth day of being in love and the thousandth day of being in love and the ten thousandth day of being in love are all part of love. And if you want to, you could no more go back and start all over again and get that same thing back.
Then you could take river, take water that had run downstream from a river and say, let's put it back upstream. It's happened already. So I made the rules like, uh-uh. If you decide this person's in love with me and we've been in love for years, but you know what? I kind of like that one over there. All right.
Make that decision, but you don't get to take that love with you when you make that decision. That's gone. And I thought, I hope, and I do hope that people will read it and make them maybe think about that whole grass being greener with somebody else idea because it's not just the first blade of grass. It's the whole lawn that you have to do all over again.
You know, Mitch, there's also the lesson that really when you get to do things over and over and over, you don't really learn much.
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Chapter 5: What lessons about love and mortality does Mitch Albom explore in Twice?
It falls apart. So I wouldn't go back and undo things if I had to sacrifice what I had learned from doing them. And Yaya, his grandmother, at one point says to him, he says, how can we only get to go back twice? You know, why don't we get to go back again and again? She says, Alfie, if you kept getting second chances, you wouldn't learn a damn thing. Hmm.
And, you know, really, even if you get one, sometimes you don't learn anything.
This idea that as we get older, we become more set in our ways. We don't take chances. We don't try things. We don't try new things. We don't do things over. Was there a particular seed for you? What were you wrestling with when you kind of came up with this idea? Yeah.
Well, I wasn't wrestling with it as much as being a byproduct of it, to be honest with you, Tanya, because I am kind of a walking example of a second chance. Many things in my life I did in the first part of my life. that would have set the pattern for maybe a whole different second half. And then things happened, and I ended up getting different opportunities.
And I watched how you can sort of bifurcate your life if certain things happen. And I thought, well, I've got experience in sort of a second act. Maybe I can work it into a book.
I mean, one of those second acts we know very well. You were a sports writer for a very long time or just for the first half of your career. And then you had this fateful interaction with an old college professor, Maury, who was dying of ALS. Was that kind of a second chance as well?
A hundred percent. Yeah, that probably is. If my life were a graph, that would be the point where you put the... The pencil in and you start drawing the line the other direction because it was a huge pivot for me. I didn't realize it at the time, but I had been extremely ambitious, extremely kind of singularly focused on becoming, you know, the best sports writer ever.
that there could be the most well-known. I was on ESPN. I did a column that was nationally syndicated across the country. I did radio. I was going 100 miles an hour and 100 hours a week. And I happened to see my old college professor, Maury Schwartz, on Nightline, I just was flipping the channels, and he was talking to Ted Koppel about what it was like to die from Lou Gehrig's disease.
And that was the first I found out that he had this disease. And he and I had been extremely close in college. I mean, I had taken every class he offered. I majored in sociology because of him. I wrote my honors thesis with him. And I had always promised that I would stay in touch.
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Chapter 6: How does Mitch Albom's work in Haiti reflect his values?
And then as I became this ambitious animal... I broke that promise for 16 years. And all of a sudden, here he is on television telling an interviewer that he's about to die. And so I called him up, thinking that I would just ease my conscience with a phone call. And he kind of guilted me into coming to visit him once. So I thought, well, I'll just go once and ease my conscience that way.
And when I saw him in person, it was... It was so moving to see, you know, how he had been stripped of so many things by the disease. He couldn't walk anymore. He could barely lift a piece of tomato up to his mouth. It took him a minute and a half to chew a single piece of tomato. He was having trouble breathing.
But he seemed so content with how he had lived his life and so interested in exploring dying and He had this amazing attitude about life. When I went home that night, I said, you're 37 years old and perfectly healthy and he's 78 years old and dying and he's 10 times happier with his life than you are. And something's wrong with that picture.
And so I started to go back and I did not realize it at the time, but that was the pivot moment in my life for everything that has come since.
Yeah. I mean, it's so amazing because really, I mean, when you look at the totality of almost every book that you've written after Tuesdays with Maury, they all tie back in a very direct way to a lot of the lessons that are written in that book. You know, it also—you wrote that book at a time when baby boomers in particular were starting to face their parents' mortality. You kind of gave—
You gave people a script on how to have those kinds of conversations with their parents or their loved ones who were nearing death. And I was curious, when did you begin to realize how profound of an impact the book was having?
I probably realized it most poignantly in airports because I, as I mentioned, I've been on ESPN regularly for years prior to that. So my face was recognizable to a lot of people. particularly sports fans. And I used to get stopped in airports and people would say, hey, sports guy. Sometimes that's all they would call me, sports guy.
Or sometimes they'd say, Mitch, who's going to win the Super Bowl?
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Chapter 7: What unique challenges does the character Alfie face with his power?
And I would just say, the New England Patriots and get on the escalator and keep going because first of all, the answer was always the Patriots back then. So that was easy. And secondly, that's all they wanted from me. And then I began to notice that people would come up to me with a different sort of tone. They would say, you're Mitch Albom, right? And I'd say, yeah. My mother died of cancer.
And the last thing we did was read Tuesdays with Maury together. Can I talk to you about her? And you can't say New England Patriots and get on the escalator. You have to stop and you have to listen. And I began to become a listener.
You know, I want to ask you about that time period when you were really being celebrated for Tuesdays with Maury. You won this very prestigious honor, the Red Smith Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2010. And When that happened, there was some criticism that rose up during that time.
Some called your work feel-good fairy tales fluff, and others said it was verging on being emotionally manipulative. And I wondered, do you ever struggle when you write about real grief and real death and this line between moving— people and manipulating them? Is that something that you've ever really sat with?
Chapter 8: What emotional experiences shaped Mitch Albom's perspective on life and loss?
And I ask this because it's something that I also struggle with when telling stories about people suffering.
Well, I think it's kind of cynical to look at something that moves people and say, oh, you're just manipulating them. I don't know what drives a person to think of criticism like that. I don't think I've ever looked at anything that's moved me and felt that the author, the director, the songwriter was out there to just try to trick me. I've never done that in my life. I wouldn't know how.
And in fact, what's funny is Tuesdays with Maury, I had one goal in writing Tuesdays with Maury from a writing perspective, and that was don't overdo it. You know, I had read – I was a sports writer. I'd never written anything like that before. And I read a bunch of books about death and, you know, different accounts of death. And they were beautiful. You know, some of them were so beautiful.
poetic in the words. And I said to myself, you can't do that. You don't have that skill set at your age. And and your experience with sports, keep it simple. Just strip it down. In fact, when I turned the book in, it was supposed to be 300 pages, and I didn't really keep a very good count of it. And they called me up a week or two later, and they said, we have a problem. I said, what?
They said, well, we laid this out. We paginated this, and this is only going to be like 175 pages. And I said, well, that's all I got. That's it. So if anything, I was going out of my way not to be manipulative or anything like that or overwrite or over sentimental. So I hadn't really heard that a lot. But now that you're telling it to me, I don't I certainly don't do that.
And I think when you write about people's grief and you write about love and you write about human emotions, you are doing what artists have done since then. You know, time immemorial. I mean, you write about feelings and you and if what I write makes people cry or leaves leaves them teary or choked up. OK, but it's not it's not I don't sit there going, oh, this will make them cry.
Believe me, I don't have that power.
Let's take a short break. If you're just joining us, my guest is writer Mitch Albom. We're talking about his new novel, Twice, and his remarkable career writing about the questions that define us, how to live well, love fully, and face the choices and second chances that shape our lives. We'll be right back after a short break. I'm Tanya Mosley, and this is Fresh Air.
Hi, this is Molly C.V. Nusberg, digital producer at Fresh Air. And this is Terry Gross, host of the show. One of the things I do is write the weekly newsletter. And I'm a newsletter fan. I read it every Saturday after breakfast. The newsletter includes all the week's shows, staff recommendations, and Molly picks timely highlights from the archive. It's a fun read.
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