Mitch Albom, TWICE: A Novel

[1:18]Zibby Owens: Welcome to Totally Booked Live. I am so excited to be here today with Mitch Albom, whose new book is called Twice a Novel. Congratulations.

[1:29]Mitch Albom: Hi. Nice to be here. Nice to have you. We've

[1:32]Zibby Owens: come a long way since you came to my apartment, what, eight years ago or so? Like, seven years You should probably qualify that a little Okay. I'm married. Okay. I'm married too.

[1:46]Mitch Albom: That's why you should qualify. When

[1:50]Zibby Owens: you when I interviewed you for Finding Chico, which was beautiful, and if anybody here has not read that, I highly recommend it. It was absolutely beautiful. Thank you. Thank you. And now you're back with Twice, which I loved. Oh my gosh, it was so good. Thank you. It's really, really good. Why don't you tell everybody what Twice is about?

[2:10]Mitch Albom: Twice is a novel about a guy named Alfie who discovers when he's a young boy that he has the magical ability to do everything in his life twice if he wants to. The kicker is that he has to live with the consequences of his second try. So, if the second try is worse than the first, too bad. He's stuck with it. And he goes through his early life kind of correcting his mistakes and making the shot in the basketball game that he missed the first time and fixing his little embarrassments with girls and things like that. Then when he becomes a man, he discovers there's one caveat to his power: it doesn't work with love. In fact, it actually works the opposite, that if you have someone who loves you and you decide to go back and try somebody else or do a second try, that person, the first person, can never love you again the same way. I mean, they'll be in the world and everything, but they just can't love you again. Of course, he meets this perfect woman, and they have this great relationship until they reach a point where something happens, and he gets tempted, and he has to make this decision. I'm not going tell you what happens because then you won't bother to read the book, but it's very much a kind of magical realism book about the grass always being greener on the other side, particularly when it comes to love. How did you think of this idea? In the shower. I don't know, Zibby, the truth is that I get asked that a lot. Ever since Tuesdays with Mori, which if anybody read that book, kind of breaks down to each chapter is we talk about this, we talk about that, we talk about this. I think my brain has always sort of gone to sliced bread kind of topics. When I decide what I want to do with a book, I don't really decide on a character or a plot. It's a theme, One of those slices of a theme. So like the five people you meet in heaven, everybody thinks I had some idea about heaven, but I really was trying to write a book about people who don't think their life matters. I said, Alright, that's something that everybody can relate to. Everybody matters, but a lot of people think they don't. How can I come up with a story that shows that? I then invented a story about a guy who goes to heaven and meets five people and finds out that all these people he touched in his life he affected even though he thought he didn't matter. It's kind of the same thing. So, the theme for me was, in my mind, was, well, you know, people are always thinking, and particularly as you get older you're not old yet, but when you get older you start to think, If I had done things differently, how would my life have turned out? When you're younger, if you want to do something different, you do it. You know, if you're working in the music business and then you decide you want to be in the accounting business, you quit and you go. But when you're later in life, it becomes like a regret, like, Oh, I should have done this, but now I can't. We start to imagine these lives that we could have had if we had only done this or only done that. That was the theme that I wanted to write about, and then I just kind of invented all the rest of it. Wow. And you also contrast Alfie's story with Vincent LaPorte, is a detective,

[5:19]Zibby Owens: because there is a crime and you have to figure out who committed the crime. You introduce this element of suspense in a way, right? We're trying to figure it out the whole time. And he ends up becoming sort of a part of the story as well. Talk about that device and just I understand you just think of it as a story, but Well,

[5:38]Mitch Albom: a purpose to the madness, you know. Most writers, I think, if you really kind of dive down, they do it for a reason. So, for me, I knew I was going to write a time travel story, and time travel stories are always fraught with danger because people start to try to take them apart. Well, wait a minute. If he goes there, then he can't do that. And you have to kind of do the same thing because you're like, Well, what are the rules? Like, for example, for Alfie, if he goes back two weeks because he wants to try a chocolate ice cream cone or something like that, okay, so he gets to do that two weeks ago. But now what happens to him? Has to go, in my book, he has to go forward those two weeks, he has to relive them all over again, He can't change the rest of the stuff, he can only change that one thing, so he has to constantly repeat his life over and over. At one point he says, I don't know how many lives, how long I've been on earth, because if you took all the repeated days and years and months, it could be multiple lifetimes. So I knew that there would be questions and maybe even some eye rolls about like, Oh, come on, that couldn't happen. So rather than letting the reader do that, I invented this scenario where Alfie gets arrested at the beginning of the book. He's older, and he gets arrested on suspicion of cheating a casino out of $2,000,000 by winning three straight roulette numbers, which nobody can ever do. I looked it up. It's impossible. You know, and he even won the odds of getting an actual, you know, not red or green, but like 36 black or whatever it is, he does it three times in a row, so they suspect he must be cheating. And then he wires the money to Africa, and so that's very suspicious. So now I have him and the detective, and that's how it sets up. While the reader may say, Well, what's going on like you did with the crime? Did he really steal $2,000,000? Wait, he says he has this power, so he probably went back and changed the numbers. Really what I was doing was I invented a character who, as he tells his story about his life as a kid and growing up and changing all these, it breaks back into the interrogation, and the detective goes, Wait a minute, hold on, come on. And so the detective is the reader, and so I beat you to the punch because I allow him to ask all those questions, and it becomes part of the plot instead of just exposition or something like that. Sometimes you actually have a purpose for these little inventions, and that was mine.

[8:01]Zibby Owens: So one of the things that happens to Alfie early on is that he loses his mother, and this becomes a big theme throughout the book, something that he is constantly

[8:10]Mitch Albom: referring to and thinking about and informs everything. Can you talk a little bit about that? Yeah, I think, as the writer of Tuesdays with Mori, I have met, honestly, thousands and thousands of people who talk to me about grief and regret, and the one most common one is, you know, if I had known that this person, that I loved my mother, my wife, my child was going to die, I would have done something differently. Alfie discovers that he has this power when he's eight years old and his mother dies. They're in Africa, they're missionaries. He's the child of a missionary. She gets bitten by a bug and catches a disease. He goes to sit with her and she's asleep, and being eight years old he decides, Well, she's asleep. My dad told me to sit with her, she's asleep. I'm going go outside and play. When he comes back she has died. He's so wracked with guilt that he wasn't there or whatever that he goes to bed thinking, If only I could do this day again, and sure enough, the next morning he wakes up and it's the previous day. His father says, Go sit with your mother. He says, What do you mean? Just go sit with your mother. And he doesn't say she died because he can't even get the words out. And he goes down the hall and sure enough his mother is in bed again. This was that moment where I got to sort of imagine, Well, what if you did get that moment again with the person that you lost? How would you do it differently? Of course, he's eight, so he really doesn't know how to handle it. Fortunately, his mother kind of picks up on what it is, and they have this beautiful little discussion because he says, Are you going to die again? She says, Come here baby, let me tell you all the things I love about you, which is something that I do with my little girl now. That's a whole other story, we're blessed to have a little baby girl now, and she gets to tell him just before she dies one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve things that she loves about him, and they're all small little things, but whatever, and he gets to have that for the rest of his life. So I know that that's a discussion that I would have loved to have had with my mother, who had a stroke and lost the ability to speak, and that was gone, and I couldn't talk to her anymore until she died. I know that it's something that most readers would want to experience, so That's the catalyst for him discovering that he has this power.

[10:38]Zibby Owens: Then the 12 things she loves, you scatter those throughout the book, which is so beautiful and helps him live and become a better person all alone. Well, that's what moms do, right? They help us become better people. You've just touched the hearts of every mom in this audience. Got to use that on the road.

[10:58]Mitch Albom: Will you come with me and ask I'll me the just keep asking. I met you in your apartment, so we have a relationship like Oh

[11:08]Zibby Owens: my goodness. When you think about your own life, aside from your mother and that soulful wish to have had that moment, what are other moments that you would have said twice to? And meanwhile, in the book also, you should just add that you can't change when someone dies. That's the other rule. That they're going to die, that is their time. So even if you go back in time, you can't affect that. Right. I thought that was important, otherwise you're Superman.

[11:37]Mitch Albom: Actually tries with a friend of his who dies in the military, and he tries to go back changes his trajectory, and sure enough keeps him from going on a job in the military, he thinks he's figured it out, and instead he dies at the same time he would have anyhow. Zibby, I know I'm going to get that question a lot. As we're talking, the book hasn't even come out yet, and I've already gotten the question a bunch of times. What would you do, or would you do anything twice in your life? Hate it when I ask questions that everyone's going to ask. Well, that's all right. That means they're the questions that everybody thinks about. Why would you hate that? That's what If we got five minutes with God, we'd probably all ask the same question, too. Don't think God would get ticked off.

[12:22]Zibby Owens: I like being compared to God. Okay, let's keep going.

[12:25]Mitch Albom: Another question about what's the meaning of life, really? My answer is this: I could give you twenty because a lot of people seem to think, I don't know, they have some vision of me that somehow I have this zen thing about my life that I wouldn't touch it. No, I would change like 50 things and I could didactically run them off for you right now, but if you said to me, okay, by changing those things you can't you will not have learned the lesson that you learned from making the mistake, then I wouldn't change any of it because every mistake that I made formed me for the next thing that I did and ultimately contributed to who I became. And kept me ultimately from making those same mistakes again. There's a line in the book I always think that authors, if this would be the question, if I was sitting in your seat and I was interviewing authors, I would ask them, What's the one line in the book that sums up the whole book? And you'd be surprised that there's a hidden key in everybody's book, at least the authors that I know, but readers don't often pick up on it, because to them it's just another line in the book, but for the author it's like the fulcrum and the thing that everything went through. In this particular book, Alfie finds out about his power from his grandmother, who he discovers late in life that she has the same power that he does, and it's something that kind of appears in their family. So he starts peppering her with questions, because it's like, Okay, what are these? What are these? And he keeps asking her, How come we only get to do things twice? How come we only get to do things twice? And she kind of doesn't want to answer them and keeps saying, Do you have a cigarette? I want to smoke it. And stuff like he says he finally says, Why do we only get to do things twice? And she looks at him and she says, Alfie, if you kept getting second chances, you'd never learn a damn thing. And that's the sentence through which everything in the book kind of travels, and it's the answer to your question. We all want second chances. We all want to get it to do it over again, but we don't realize that if we undid what we did, we wouldn't know what we know now, you know, and we wouldn't learn anything. So that mystery and allure of a second chance isn't all it's cracked up to be, and the book is rife with examples of that. So My answer is, yeah, if you want me to start listing, I should have done this and I should have done that and could have done this and could have done that. Yeah, I can do all that, but not if it means that I don't learn from all the things I did wrong.

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[17:41]Zibby Owens: But ultimately, when not to and I'm not going to give away the end, obviously everybody needs Please don't. To read the I've already given away three quarters of the book. So do we want this gift or not? Is this a good thing for Alfie or not?

[18:00]Mitch Albom: I'm going to let people decide that by reading it because that really is sort of the question of the book, you know, and without giving away, you know, the most critical part of it, I'll just say he has to learn that lesson. He pays a very steep price for this, and that was one of the fun things about having him sort of tell the story to the detective. If you ever saw, like, a Slumdog Millionaire, for example, which I thought was a great example of, you know, he's being investigated for this supposed crime of cheating on a game show, but through his explanation of why he's innocent, you find out how he knew the answers to all the questions. It's a similar kind of device. You know, a grizzled cop who's kind of weary and world weary. He's always catching casino cheats, and now here's a guy who comes along with this crazy story, and he sort of is interested in it because it's not boring. It's not the same old, I didn't do it, I never did. He says, if you really want to know what happened to me, and he takes out a notebook and he makes him read it, and then he ends up having to read it himself, and it's the story of his life that he was going to give to somebody, you know, before he died. And so having that other person ask all those questions, Alfie gets to sort of say, This is the price that I've paid for my gift. And the cop, being the reader, says, Man, you really feel sorry for yourself, don't you? You know, and all those kind of cynical responses to it. So it never gets to self pitying because you always have this cop or detective who goes, I gotta tell you, for a guy who gets to do things twice, you sure as hell make a lot of mistakes. That character was the most fun, and when they make a they're actually doing a movie about it, to me that's the role that you want to play because you're a cynic. Wait, tell us about the movie. That's so great. For the first time in my writing career, the book was chased after before it came out. There was a big bidding thing, so Netflix wanted and they've already got a writer, Paul Weitz, who is really great. I've met him multiple times now. He wrote about and directed About a Boy. You remember that film with Hugh Grant and many other films. The first time I met him, he had this book that was underlined, it was the galley. The book wasn't out yet. He had every line, and he went through all these things. I said, Well, you know it better than I do, so go ahead. He's already writing it and putting it together, and he agreed that whoever gets to play the detective is that's the role you want because you're the fulcrum of all this story. Then, of course, you have to cast Alfie and Gianna as the woman of his dreams, and that's one of those I think they're doing it on the Internet now. Who do you want to play? This one and that one? I

[21:08]Zibby Owens: know you picked your favorite line in the book, but I want to nominate a second choice. A second, you know, a backup line. Our best choices often come when we have no choice. Yeah. Alright, tell me about that. Do you believe in Yes, I do. I have faced many decisions in my life

[21:27]Mitch Albom: that I felt boxed in and didn't want to have to deal with but had no choice. Many of them have to do with this orphanage I operate in Haiti, which you and I have talked about and Chica came I've been there for sixteen years now, go every month, and have had well over 100 kids come through, and many of them now are up here in college, many of them have been very sick and extremely impoverished. I've had to make a lot of decisions that you have no choice, and you want to look at the sky and go, How can I be in this position? Sometimes, as I say, you make the best decisions when you don't have an option. One of the things that haunts us is I could do this, I could do that, I could do this, I could do that, and we torture ourselves over what we could do. Sometimes it's like, I just have to do this and I have no choice. I have to get this We had a kid that had a hole in his esophagus and everything he was trying to eat was going into his lungs. So he couldn't eat, he couldn't drink, he couldn't do anything. We tried to get him to the one doctor there that supposedly did this and they left him in the hallway of this hospital for six days. Finally, just said, you know, was like, wait? Do Not wait? I said to my director, who was up there with him, Get him out and we're putting him on a plane, we're getting him here, I don't care what it takes. And he said, Well, they won't let him leave. I said, You take him, you put him in a car, and you get him out. You don't ask them, you just go, and I'm get going him out of here. And sure enough, he did that, we flew him to The States. They didn't have a single feeding tube in all of Haiti that didn't go down your throat. Of course, you can't eat if it goes down your throat because that's the problem that he had. Now that we have stomach feeding tubes, but they don't have them there. Literally, when we landed in The United States, it was just a couple days before Christmas, at the airport when I was there, the ambulance, they put a feeding tube in him in the ambulance. I mean, he was days away from dying, Hours even. You look at that, you look back at that and you go, Boy, if I had just sat there longer and contemplated, he could have died. That's just one episode, I can tell you a bunch more. I've seen what it's like when you have no choice. And sometimes it's not a decision tree anymore. It's, I'm doing this, and then I'm going to do this, and I'm going to do this. You don't think about all the other possibilities. That is true. Sometimes the best choices come when we have no choice. Wow.

[24:17]Zibby Owens: So a lot of your books, and in a way obviously this book as well, really focus on loss and what we do with loss and how we get through it and what loss teaches us. What is your takeaway on that?

[24:30]Mitch Albom: Well, you know, I've really dealt, Zibby, with that question now for, you know, almost thirty years since Tuesdays with Maury. Know, I can tell you that one of my favorite quotes that I've learned over time on this is one that says, The only whole heart is a broken heart. I do believe that that's true. I don't think that we can love the way that we sorry, to make some noise. That was either gas or a reaction to something I said. I do think you have to go through heartbreak in order to really love. I think you have to go through loss in order to really appreciate. In A Stranger in the Lifeboat, which I wrote a lot of people again, you know, like we talk about what's your motivation, everybody thinks I wanted to write a book about 10 people in a lifeboat who think that they're about to die, and then they pull a guy in who says he's God and they don't believe him. That wasn't it at all. I wanted to write a book about help and how sometimes help is right in front of us and we don't realize it. There's a line in that book where the protagonist is talking about his wife dying to God, the character plays God, he says, Why did you take my wife from me? And God says, Why is it that when you have loss you always talk about what I've taken from you? Why is it that you never talk about what I've given you? That was in a direct response to the loss of our daughter, our little girl Chica, who had died, and my initial reaction when she died at seven was, Why did you take her? Over the years I've come to understand that I should have been asking, What did we do right that we were given her for that period of time? What I try to look at loss that way and I try to tell people who ask me to look at it that way too, Look at what you have. Oh, my mother died and it's so terrible. How old was she? She was 87. You had your mother on this earth for eighty seven years? Think about if you had lost her twenty years earlier. What gave you those extra twenty years? What did you do to deserve that? When you start thinking about it humbly like that, you realize that most everything we have in life is a gift. When everything is a gift, then even when you lose it, you can just think of it as, Well, I was lucky to have it for the time I had it. That's a much better way to go through it than to just lament all the things you don't have in your life anymore. That's what I've learned.

[27:12]Zibby Owens: My gosh. Thank you, Mitch. Thank you for all of this advice. Thank you for Twice, which we'll all read twice. It's amazing.

[27:20]Mitch Albom: Thank

[27:21]Zibby Owens: you. Thank you for listening to Totally Booked with Zibby, formerly moms don't have time to read books. If you loved the show, tell a friend, leave a review, follow me on Instagram at Zippy Owens, and spread the word. Thanks so much. Oh, and buy the books.