TONYA MOSLEY, HOST:
This is FRESH AIR. I'm Tonya Mosley, and my guest today is Mitch Albom. It was 30 years ago that he wrote "Tuesdays With Morrie," a tender, true story about the lessons he learned from his old college professor, Morrie 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. 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 Morrie," Albom has written eight best sellers, 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 Morrie didn't just shape the writer Albom became - they also changed how he moved through the world. Morrie 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.
MITCH ALBOM: Thank you for having me.
MOSLEY: OK. 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?
ALBOM: Probably just getting older. I think, you know, 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, the 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. And I wanted to explore, well, 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. And 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.
MOSLEY: 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?
ALBOM: 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 8 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 8 years old. I'll just go out and play. So he goes out and plays. And while he's out playing, she dies.
MOSLEY: Right.
ALBOM: And when he comes back in, he realizes 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. And his mother is still alive in bed. And 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, because she realizes he has this power. She says, sit here. 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, you know - he was playing Superman when she died. And he writes a sentence, my mother died while I was trying to fly. And, Tonya, 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 a stroke and couldn't talk. And I missed having a last conversation with her because no one knew, of course, the stroke was coming. And then all of a sudden, she couldn't talk anymore.
And so 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. 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 10,000th day of being in love are all part of love. And you could no more go back and start all over again and get that same thing back than you could 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, if you decide this person is 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 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 (laughter), you know, that you have to you have to do all over again.
MOSLEY: 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.
ALBOM: Yeah. Yeah.
MOSLEY: Yeah.
ALBOM: And that, Tonya, is kind of the takeaway from it for me. You know, a number of people since the book has come out have asked me, so is there anything in your life that you would do over again? And I think some people expect that I would say - I don't know, they think "Tuesdays With Morrie" has turned me into a Zen master or something, and I would say, no, no, all is what the universe is supposed to be, you know. No, of course I would do things over in my life. I can rattle off 30 things right now. But if you said to me, in doing them over, you have to surrender whatever you've learned and whatever you've done as a result of what you've learned from your mistakes, then I wouldn't trade it because all of those things that I would redo, the consequences of those things made me who - into who I am now. You know, it's like taking out a piece of the tapestry. It falls apart. So I wouldn't go back and undo things if I had to sacrifice what I had learned from doing them.
Yaya, his grandmother, at one point, says to him, he says, how come 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. And, you know, really, even if you get one, sometimes you don't learn anything.
MOSLEY: Let's take a short break. If you're just joining us, my guest is writer Mitch Albom. His new novel, "Twice," explores what happens when a man discovers he can relive any moment of his life. But every second chance comes with a price. We'll continue our conversation after a short break. This is FRESH AIR.
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MOSLEY: This is FRESH AIR. Our guest today is writer Mitch Albom. His new novel, "Twice," is about a man who can undo any moment and relive it but learns that once you undo love, that person can never fall in love with you again. Albom is the author of 13 other books, including "The Little Liar," "Tuesdays With Morrie" and "The Five People You Meet In Heaven."
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?
ALBOM: Well, I wasn't wrestling with it as much as being a byproduct of it, to be honest with you, Tonya, 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.
MOSLEY: 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, Morrie, who was dying of ALS. Was that kind of a second chance as well?
ALBOM: Hundred percent. Yeah. That probably is the - if my life were a graph, that would be the - you know, the point where you put 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 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 Morrie 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. 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 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 was - 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.
MOSLEY: 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 Morrie," 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 are nearing death. And I was curious, when did you begin to realize how profound of an impact the book was having?
ALBOM: 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. You know, sometimes that's all they would call me, sports guy, you know, or sometimes they'd say, Mitch, who's going to win the Super Bowl? And I would just say, you know, 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 Morrie" together. Can I talk to you about her? And you can't say, New England Patriots, and get on the escalator.
MOSLEY: Right. Right, right.
ALBOM: You have to stop, and you have to listen. And I began to become a listener.
MOSLEY: You know, I want to ask you about that time period when you were really being celebrated for "Tuesdays With Morrie." 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 wonder, 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? And I ask this because it's something that I also struggle with when telling stories about people suffering.
ALBOM: 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 Morrie," - I had one goal in writing "Tuesdays With Morrie" from a writing perspective, and that was don't overdo it.
You know, I had read - I was a sports writer. I had 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 poetic in the words that they use. And I said to myself, you can't do that. You don't have that skill set at your age 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, you know (laughter). That's it.
So if anything, I was going out of my way not to be manipulative or anything like that or overwrite or oversentimental. 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, you know, time immemorial. I mean...
MOSLEY: Yeah.
ALBOM: You write about feelings, and you - and if what I write makes people cry or leaves them teary or choked up, OK. But it's not - I don't sit there going, oh, this will make them cry (laughter).
MOSLEY: No.
ALBOM: Believe me, I don't have that power.
MOSLEY: 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 Tonya Mosley and this is FRESH AIR.
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MOSLEY: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Tonya Mosley. We're continuing our conversation with writer Mitch Albom about his new novel, "Twice," his writing process and how his work as a journalist shaped the stories he tells about life, love and second chances. His new novel is about a man who can undo any moment and relive it but learns that once you undo love, that person can never fall in love with you again. Albom is the author of 13 books, including "Tuesdays With Morrie," which became a movie and was adapted into more than 600 plays around the world.
So much of your sports writing was very narrative-based. So, yes, you were writing about the winning of games...
ALBOM: Right.
MOSLEY: ...And the play-by-play, but you also were writing these really deep, well-thought-out columns and pieces in the Sunday paper.
ALBOM: Yeah. Well, I always felt that that, first of all, sports - I never got into sports because I was that interested in sports. I got into sports because that's where the job was when I got started and because I thought that it was a great tapestry to talk about human emotion. You know, there's always a winner, a loser. There's the agony of trying, and then you come up short because you get injured. There's so much emotion involved in it.
But I'll give you a perfect example, Tonya, of something that I wrote that appealed to me and is the kind of emotion that I think good writing contains. It's probably the biggest reaction I ever had to a sports column I wrote. And I write in Detroit. I write for the Detroit Free Press. It was not about a Detroit team or a Detroit athlete or a Detroit sports story. It was about a person who no one in my market had ever heard of before. I was at the Olympics. I think it was 1992 in Barcelona. I had gone there early to the stadium to prepare for - Carl Lewis, the famous Olympian, was running in 100 meters that night, and I knew that it would be hard to get a seat. So I had gone there really early to get a good seat where I could see the race, and I figured I'd just spend the afternoon there.
While I was there waiting, the place was half empty, and they were running these heats for the 400 meters, which is one lap around the track. And the gun went off, bunch of runners I'd never heard of start running around the track. One of them pulls up lame, which happens all the time. He pulled a hamstring or something. And he's in the lane, and everyone else is running past him, and I say to myself, oh, too bad, that guy's out of it. And all of a sudden, a man runs out of the stands and comes onto the field, gets onto the track...
MOSLEY: Yeah.
ALBOM: ...And picks this guy up...
MOSLEY: Yeah.
ALBOM: ...And starts walking him around the track. Well, by the time they get around the curve, everyone is, you know, come on, you know, like this, cheering, cheering. And the man puts the - it's an older man, and he puts the younger man, the runner, on his feet. So his heels are on his feet, and he's sort of walking him that way. And they get to the finish line. Of course, there's this big applause. He finishes, you know, like, a minute and a half after everybody else did. So I go racing downstairs, and we find the man who came out of the stands, and I run up to him and I say, who are you? And he says, I'm his father. And I said, why did you do what you did? He said, well, I couldn't bear to see him you know, hurt, and I just felt - I know I'm not supposed to be out there, but I just ran out there, and I knew that if he didn't cross the finish line, he wouldn't get recorded in the books as having actually participated in the Olympics. So it was so important for him to cross the finish line.
And I said, well, why didn't you just urge him or hold him? He said, well, I taught him how to run. When he was a little boy - I'm getting choked up telling this story. When he was a little boy, I put his feet on my feet, and I taught him how to run. And that's what I did again. And I went back to my chair, and I called my editor, and I said, I'm not writing about Carl Lewis. I have a better story. They said, what are you talking about? You know, it's Carl Lewis. He says, you know, you got to write - I said, trust me, this is a better story. And I wrote about this guy, Derek Redmond, and his father, who picked him up and put him on his feet and walked around the track.
Now, I'm getting choked up just telling you that story. And I've told that story a batch of times over the course of my life. But as someone who is very much about children and children who are hurt or weak and taking care of them, that gets to me. And I don't know how to write that story without emotion. So, if that's manipulative, then I guess I'm manipulative. But I just wrote it the way that it happened. And to this day, I hear people tell me about, oh, I remember that story about that guy. They don't remember his name. They don't remember the Olympics. But they remember...
MOSLEY: They remember.
ALBOM: ...That a father found his son and helped him in his time of need. And that's what I look for in my books. That's what I look for in any column. That's what I look for in any movie or any screenplay or anything that I write, is how can everybody relate to what I'm writing.
MOSLEY: I remember that story, too. You know, it makes me think about you being a sports reporter in Detroit at a very specific time period. I mean, the peak of your sports writing career happened. The Pistons, I mean, they were just the sports team back in the late '80s and '90s. The Tigers won in '84. But this was also when Detroit was being devastated by the crack epidemic. The city kind of felt lawless in ways that went beyond what most Americans understood. And so sports was kind of this unifying force, maybe the one thing the whole city could gather around. That's what I remember as a young person in Detroit, reading your columns and just being a part of all of it. And I just always wonder, were you writing about joy and about victories in the middle of all of that suffering with an awareness of the contrast as you were living it?
ALBOM: Well, I didn't write to try to contrast it. I wrote kind of like surfing on the wave of the city. And I could feel, because I lived there, how we felt. And, you know, in Detroit, we don't mind calling ourselves we, you know - how we sort of felt about our teams and how we felt when they were successful, how we felt, for example, when the Red Wings won the Stanley Cup, and the next - two days later, they had a big parade. And two of their players and one of their staff members were involved in this terrible car crash when the limo driver was drunk, and they were never the same again. You know, one became a paraplegic. And how we felt about that, you know, and the shock. And so I would try to reflect the emotions of the city. But I also would dive into a lot of those moments that you're talking about and those neighborhoods that you're talking about. And often, Tonya - and if you were there, perhaps you remember - I would write a series every winter called "Dreams Deferred." And they would be about athletes who were cut short or had their dreams cut short because of something that happened in our city, you know, be it a drunk driving incident, a bullet, a shooting, a crash, something like that.
I remember one about this young man who was a very promising high school basketball player. And all of a sudden, he stopped coming to practice. At the height of his, you know, success, he just stopped coming. And then he stopped coming to school. And the coach went out to, you know, find out why, and he found out that his mother was a crack addict, and that when he would go leave the house, the dealers would come to the house and sell her drugs, and she'd get high again and couldn't get out of it. So he quit school and quit the basketball team to stand on the porch. And he was only, like, 15.
And he stood on the porch, and whenever they would come around, he'd say get out of here, you know? And they'd say, well, where's your mother? She doesn't want to have anything to do with you. He became like a sentinel on his own porch. So I wrote that story. I went and interviewed him. I interviewed his mother. And I would do umpteen stories like that because I felt that I needed to reflect the city that I worked in. And that was the truth of the city that I worked in, too, not just, you know, the Pistons' success or the parades or the Red Wings, you know, winning Stanley Cups, but the flip side of it.
MOSLEY: 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 break. This is FRESH AIR.
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MOSLEY: This is FRESH AIR. And today we're talking to writer Mitch Albom, whose new novel, "Twice," asks what would you do if you could live every moment of your life again? We're discussing his latest work, his journey from sports columnist to one of America's bestselling authors and the philanthropic work that he calls the most important thing he's ever done.
You know, you spoke earlier about your soft spot for children, for young people. There's this work you're doing in Haiti. You have been operating an orphanage there for, like, 15 years. How did Haiti, of all places, become part of your life?
ALBOM: Well, as you know, there was a terrible earthquake in January of 2010 in Haiti. A pastor came to me and said he had an orphanage there, but it had been destroyed, and he couldn't get down there, and he thought that all the kids were dead. Could I help him get down there? And he came to me because I have a radio program in Detroit. And I used some connections I had, and we were able to get a small plane trip into Haiti just a couple of weeks after the earthquake when no commercial flights were going and nobody was getting down there. And you couldn't get cell service or anything.
And we went in, and what I saw there was the worst devastation that I hope to ever see in my life. There were people dead in the street. There were people doing triage, doctors, in the street. People climbing on piles of rubble, pulling out rocks and looking for loved ones. You know, people without water, electricity, any food. And we went to this orphanage, and it hadn't been destroyed, but it had been overrun by people jumping the walls thinking that they were going to bring food there. So there were hundreds of people mixed in with the kids.
But I was so taken with the children. They were so joyous. And they prayed every night. And they were thankful even though they didn't own a thing, you know? And their toilets were holes in the ground, and there was no kitchen. They just would eat a couple things of rice a day. So when I went back, I started writing stories about it. And I gathered up a group of guys in Detroit. You know, a lot of people in Detroit work with their hands. We're good at that.
And I got plumbers and roofers and contractors and electricians, and we started going down there. And we ended up making nine separate trips. And we built the first toilets that they had ever had, built the first showers, the first kitchen, the first school eventually. But I noticed that the kids were still starving. Every time we came down there, they were still just basically eating cups of rice and, you know, not very much. And I said to the pastor, what's going on? And that's when he said, well, I don't have any money to run this place.
MOSLEY: Yeah.
ALBOM: And I'm 80-something years old. And I kind of blurted out, well, I could probably operate this place.
MOSLEY: Help. I mean, but I don't I don't want to understate this because, I mean, like, this is like, it's a core part of your life and what you do. In the same way that you were going every Tuesday to see Morri, you go to Haiti on a regular basis. You're flying back and forth all the time. There's a lot that's happening in Haiti right now. There's a lot of gang violence that's happening. Just this past summer, the Trump administration terminated this temporary protected status for Haiti.
ALBOM: Yeah.
MOSLEY: Is this right, that you have like 24 security guards to protect the orphanage from gangs at any given time?
ALBOM: Yes, that's all correct. I've been going there for, yeah, coming on 16 years in January. And we've had, you know, over a hundred kids come through. Many of them are up here now in college. I think we have about 16 in college and one in medical school in his third year, one going to medical school. But life in Haiti at the orphanage is brutal. And I can't even fly into Port-au-Prince anymore. I have to fly into Cap Haitien, which is a little town up north, about 100 and some miles from Port-au-Prince, and then take a helicopter just to try to land on a hill.
MOSLEY: And how often are you doing that?
ALBOM: I try to go every month, yeah. I mean, the gang violence sometimes makes it impossible, but otherwise, I go every month. And, you know, I look at these kids as my family, you know? And we have a great staff there. But we have to take armored cars if we go anywhere. Our kids haven't been outside of the orphanage in over four years. They have not set foot outside. Imagine that. It's not safe. You can get kidnapped. You can get shot. We have bullet casings that land on our grounds all the time.
The other day, I got to call, a picture of one of our supposedly bulletproof cars and the back window was smashed, and there was a bullet. Somebody shot from somewhere. They're not necessarily shooting at us, but comes over the wall and goes through the back glass of your car, and if somebody had been in there, they would have been shot. You know, electricity. Maybe you get it a couple hours a day. There are days you don't get it at all. Diesel fuel is ridiculously expensive. Water is difficult to find. And I constantly try to trumpet, you know, this country is just off our coast. It's an hour and a half from Miami, you know?
MOSLEY: Yeah.
ALBOM: And we were in Haiti in the, you know, 20th century. We occupy or controlled its government, you know, basically for 15 years. We - their money was in our banks. We helped write their constitution. We have a history with Haiti, and we shouldn't ignore it. And unfortunately, not only us, but it feels like the rest of the world, kind of, ah, that's just Haiti. Haiti's always trouble. But there's so much heartbreak and so much poverty. And yet, the kids are brilliant.
MOSLEY: That has to be frustrating. I mean, I'm using the term frustrating, but I mean, it's got to be something even bigger - a bigger feeling or sentiment that you feel. At this point, you know, Morrie said to you, you need to do more than write a check, and it's pretty obvious with all the things that you do that you're doing much more than writing a check. But then you're also up against the limits of what one person can do - even with the support of others who have been there to help you financially and also go down there with you.
ALBOM: Well, that's why you try to enlist others to support you, and that's why I write about it. And that's why I wrote "Finding Chika," you know, which was a story about a little girl who we adopted from Haiti who had a brain tumor, and in it, I tell the whole story of the orphanage. Because you're right. I can't do it by myself, and nobody can do it by myself. And I don't kid myself that I'm going to able to save Haiti in any way. If you can save one little piece of it and someone else comes down and saves another little piece of it - and these are children.
I mean, we have children who have been abandoned, left under trees to die. You know, a woman picked up a child who was left in the woods, crying, and she brought him to the police, and she said, I found this child who was abandoned. The police said, well, what did you pick him up for? Now we have to do paperwork. Why didn't you just leave him there? That's what we're up against there. We have children who were left at malnutrition clinics, and nobody comes back for them. They come to us, you know, skeletons.
We have a little girl that's now in my life, who was brought to us at 6 months, she weighed 6 pounds. She'd had nothing to eat but sugar water. Nothing solid to eat for the first six months of her life. And we had to bring her to America and put her on this nutrition - round-the-clock nutrition program every two hours, feeding her this stuff, you know, just to try to get her to live.
MOSLEY: Nadia, is that her name?
ALBOM: Nadie, Nadie, yeah.
MOSLEY: Nadie.
ALBOM: Yeah.
MOSLEY: Nadie.
ALBOM: She's the joy of our lives now, but...
MOSLEY: She's 3 years old.
ALBOM: Three and a half, yeah.
MOSLEY: And you now adopted her. Three and a half.
ALBOM: Well, we're in the process of it, yes. We're her legal guardians here.
MOSLEY: 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," 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. This is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF CLARK TERRY AND SWING FEVER SONG, "TOPSY")
MOSLEY: This is FRESH AIR. And today, we're talking to Mitch Albom, whose new novel "Twice" asks what would you do if you could live every moment of your life again? His first book, "Tuesdays With Morrie," became a national best-seller, a movie and a phenomenon around the world.
You wrote "Finding Chika" in 2019. As you mentioned, you brought her to Michigan for treatment. She died from a brain tumor at 7 years old. And that book - I mean, you're right. You write in great detail about what's happening there in Haiti. But it's about loving a child you knew you were going to lose.
ALBOM: Yeah.
MOSLEY: And so now you have Nadie, this 3 1/2-year-old girl. What makes you open your heart like that again?
ALBOM: Oh, you just look at these children and your heart is open. I don't know how anybody can see the look in these kids' eyes and see what they've endured. I don't know how anybody can hold a baby who weighs 6 pounds and can't open her eyes and not say, I have to help this child, or see a little girl who has a brain tumor and bring her to hospital, and they say, she's going to be dead in four months, just take her back to Haiti and let her die, and not say to yourself, no, I can't do that. I think we're put in this Earth to help children and to guide them. It's the greatest honor of my life to be in Haiti and to have any kind of effect on these kids. And, you know, it's a gift to be able to take care of children.
And when we lost Chika, I have to admit, I was very angry at God and the world. I thought, how can you take a 7 year old? You know, what did she do? And selfishly, you know, my wife and I didn't have children of our own. And then we got involved with this orphanage, and, of course, we've got all these dozens of them around. But then all of a sudden, we had this one who was in our lives. And she was sleeping in our bedroom, and she lived for two years, and we traveled around the world trying to find a cure and became a family. And she died in our arms, in our bed. You know, we held her as her final heartbeat disappeared. I remember that.
I remember that, you know, like, it just happened. And we got these two amazing years in our 50s to be parents of this beautiful, funny, loud, kind of obnoxious kid who was just so charming. And we got to be, you know, her mom and dad for that period of time. That's a gift. And when I tried to look at the world that way, and I try to look at our kids now that way, and I certainly look at Nadie that way, then why would you not accept that gift as many times as it comes into your life. If it's one, if it's two, it's a dozen, if it's 50 or 60, like we have there now, it's a gift to take care of children.
MOSLEY: You know, I was thinking about how Morrie was - he was 78 when he gave you all those gifts of wisdom, these lessons that changed the trajectory of your life, that has you doing the work that you're doing now and the stories that you're telling. You're 67. Is that right?
ALBOM: Mm-hmm.
MOSLEY: You're approaching your 70s. You're approaching that age that he was. How are you thinking about your own mortality?
ALBOM: Well, yeah, I say that a lot when sometimes people come up to me and they go, Morrie, can I ask you - I go, I'm not Morrie.
MOSLEY: (Laughter) Yeah. Yeah.
ALBOM: I was the stupid one, remember? He was the smart one. But then I realize I'm a lot closer to Morrie's age now than my age when that all happened. And I am trying to leave a legacy of the people that I touch because I saw that Morrie did, and I see what's important to me now is who do I influence, or is there something that I've learned along the way that I can pass on? If I can somehow influence people positively, get them to think. The best compliment anybody ever gives me when they read my books is not, oh, wow, what a wordsmith you are or anything like that, it's I can't stop thinking about what you wrote or your book really made me think or made me examine my life. Then I've created a little ripple in the pond, and I'd be very content with that.
MOSLEY: Mitch, I've never been able to really tell you just how influential you've been to my life and career and how much of just a real honor it is to be sitting here talking to you.
ALBOM: Well, that's very kind of you. I remember - if I remember right, didn't you tell me once you wrote me a letter when you were younger when you lived in Detroit?
MOSLEY: Yeah. I mean, it was more than that. Like, I think I first discovered you at 11. I would sit with my grandfather and he'd read the paper, and he was really into all the sports, and I would read the sports section, and I fell in love with your writing. And I had a Brother typewriter, and I would rewrite your...
ALBOM: Right.
MOSLEY: ...Columns to learn how to write. And I would write you, and you'd write me back these nice typed letters with your signature, which I kept. And I was an apprentice at The Free Press in 1993. It was their first apprenticeship...
ALBOM: Right.
MOSLEY: ...Program. And the first thing I asked was - the security guard, can I see Mitch Albom's desk? And they took me up to the floor where your office was. They said, he doesn't work out of here anymore. He works in his home office.
ALBOM: Yeah.
MOSLEY: But you gave me a vision for what my future could be.
ALBOM: Wow.
MOSLEY: And...
ALBOM: Well, you see, you've answered your last question for me, you know? You are the answer to that question. You know, you're going to be here longer than I am, most likely, and you're going to influence all kinds of people. And you're a ripple from my stone that - and you'll create ripples of your own and effect to other people. And that's - I mean, I can't tell you how much that means to me. That's - especially as you get older and you look for some kind of significance, you know, in your life, that's it. You're it. So what a gift this has been to me just to - what a thing to hear.
MOSLEY: Mitch Albom, thank you so much for talking to me.
ALBOM: Oh, it's been a pleasure. Thank you for having me.
MOSLEY: Mitch Albom's new novel is "Twice." On the next FRESH AIR, we remember Diane Keaton and listen back to her 1997 interview. She talked about "Annie Hall," "The Godfather," and how she got her start in a production of "Hair." I hope you can join us.
To keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews, follow us on Instagram at @nprfreshair. FRESH AIR's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our managing producer is Sam Briger. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Ann Marie Baldonado, Lauren Krenzel, Therese Madden, Monique Nazareth, Thea Chaloner, Susan Nyakundi and Anna Bauman. Our digital media producer is Molly Seavy-Nesper. Our consulting visual producer is Hope Wilson. Roberta Shorrock directs the show. With Terry Gross, I'm Tonya Mosley.
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