Mitch Albom: He Wrote the Best-Selling Memoir of All-Time

Transcript

Table of Contents

• [00:00:36] Serve the story, always

• [00:05:56] Slow parts fast, fast parts slow

• [00:07:48] Choose a theme, then tell a story

• [00:14:56] Write simply, not flowery

• [00:22:34] How Mitch deals with deadlines

• [00:30:24] Telling a story like no one else

• [00:42:40] Writing for yourself vs the reader

• [00:47:58] Find the theme people can relate to

• [01:04:30] Start with the rhythm

• [01:09:23] Writing with humility

• [01:22:23] Stories about love (after the flame is lit)

• [01:32:55] Loss of life vs loss of love

David Perell:

I challenge you to walk through an airport without seeing one of Mitch Albom’s books on the shelves. It’s just not going to happen. He’s everywhere. He is famous for writing “The Five People You Meet in Heaven.”

And then there’s “Tuesdays with Morrie,” which I think at one point was the best-selling memoir of all time. He’s written 14 books. He’s sold more than 40 million copies. He’s been writing for more than 45 years.

So I said, Mitch, come on the show and let’s just talk about how you go about the craft. How do you build characters? How do you hook people in at the beginning? And we started with the granddaddy of them all: how do you tell a great story?

Well, Mitch, I want to start with the idea of serving the story, serving the story above everything else.

Mitch Albom:

Serving the story. Well, first of all, you have to decide whether it’s in novel writing, nonfiction, or even journalism, I think. What’s the one big idea that you’re trying to get across?

Make sure that you don’t ever sail too far away from that. You get lost in the weeds, or there’s a great anecdote you want to add, or whatever, you’ve always got to be tethered to that. Now, it doesn’t mean you can’t take a deviation. It doesn’t mean you can’t say, even in writing, let me say something about this, or let me tell you a story about this, but you’re always hanging on to that cord.

I liken it to sort of those space movies where they go outside the spaceship. You know, that cord is everything. As long as they’re tethered to the cord, it doesn’t matter that they’re going at a gazillion miles an hour. It doesn’t matter if there’s asteroids, whatever, but the minute they let go of that cord, they’re never getting back.

So I think that that’s the thing that I’ve tried to do is keep, you can call it story, you can call it theme, lots of words for it. But I always try to remember what I’m serving in whatever piece I write. One of the ways you do that in journalism, when you write a column, for example, is your first paragraph and your last paragraph tend to work together, and so you kind of know you’re sailing towards that last paragraph.

With novel writing, I find that I like to know the endings of my books before I start them. I don’t have to know the middles, and sometimes I even change the beginnings, but I kind of want to know what my North Star is that I’m sailing towards.

So there are different ways that you do it, but I find that that to be really important and that readers appreciate it because I think the worst thing you want to hear as a writer is, “I tried to read it, but I got lost.”

David Perell:

And there’s such impatience in people. You know, I know you got started with television, and that’s where that understanding of catching their attention quickly comes from, even at the dinner table growing up. You have to tell the story fast. You have to hook them quickly.

Mitch Albom:

Well, I really did learn my storytelling at the dinner table. I get asked a lot, when did you become a writer? Did you decide you wanted to be a writer? I wasn’t one of those people who wanted to be a writer when he was a kid.

I wanted to be a cartoonist, and maybe writing comic books is an idea of writing. Then I became a musician, and again, I always say music and writing are fairly closely connected, more than people realize, but still not writing writing. I only became a writer in my 20s, and I’d never written anything before that. But I’d always been a good storyteller. I was a kid at camp who they would pick to tell the ghost story.

The way that I learned that was at the dinner table because my family had holiday celebrations, and we had a pretty extended family, second generation. Some of my older uncles and aunts were immigrants or first generation. I would listen to them after dinner. They would all sit around the table, all the kids would scatter, but I would sit at the table.

For some reason, I was just interested in watching them tell stories. I would notice there was a distinct difference between my aunts and my uncles. My aunts would always get caught on the details.

They would ask, “Was it 1945? Well, no, maybe it was ‘46. When was Manny born? Was he born in ‘46 or was it ‘45?” The uncles would get impatient, they’d go, “Who cares? Get to the point.”

The uncles would tell the war stories, and my Uncle Eddie in particular, he’d say, “So there we were, see, we were coming over the hill, and it was dark, and we heard the shots. Then I turned to the guy next to me. I said, ‘They’re shooting at us.’” That’s how you tell a story.

Somehow through osmosis, that kind of found its way into me. I’ve always known when I’m losing somebody and know when I have to bring it back. Interestingly, working with children, which I do a lot because I operate an orphanage, holding a child’s attention when you tell a story is a great exercise for being a writer because you see it in their eyes.

When they’re starting to fade, you realize, “Get back to it, get back to it, get back to the thing.” Or you got to throw in an exciting line, or you have to have some dialogue or something like that. I find that a lot of that mentality that I have to do when I have a three-year-old now, to keep her interest is the same thing on a more mature level that I have to do as a writer.

David Perell:

I heard something recently, I’m curious to hear your take on that. The key to storytelling is to tell the slow parts fast and the fast parts slow.

Mitch Albom:

I like that. My mother said to me once when she read my book, she said, “I like your writing because you don’t have any of those long pages with all the details in it that I don’t ever like to read when I read books.” I said, “Okay.”

I think she was talking about the Tom Clancy “this is how a submarine works” kind of thing. There’d be three straight pages of how submarine widgets fit together and all that. That I think is the slow parts fast that you want to get through or avoid the slow parts altogether and just cut them.

Interestingly, my biggest problem as a young writer, a really young writer, was that if I got criticized by editors or even in school, it was that I was taking too long to make my points or that they would say this is awkward, is too long, afraid the sentence is awkward. I became very sensitive to that criticism.

I began to whittle at my sentences and whittle and whittle and whittle, and now I have probably gone the other way so that my books are very short and they’re very terse. If anything, my books are literally small. They’re like pint sized books. If they were regular length sized books, they would probably only be in the 200 page range, 220-30 page range.

That’s compensation for having taken too long on the slow parts, as you call it, when I was very young, and now I probably, if I make any mistake, I probably do it the other way. I probably get through stuff too quickly.

David Perell:

So tell me about Twice, as you were thinking about the ending, as you’re writing the book without giving it away, how are you thinking about working towards that ending?

Mitch Albom:

For me, I pick a theme and then I decide to create a story around it.

David Perell:

And then that theme is Twice.

Mitch Albom:

The theme was that the grass is always greener, particularly when it comes to love. That’s what I wanted to write about. All my books start with a theme, and then I create the story around the theme, not the other way around. I don’t start with characters. I don’t start with plots. I start with a theme that I want to cover.

It’s always interesting to me to read about myself when some comments or people say, “Oh, he wrote that book because of this, or he did that.” Often they’re wrong. I understand why they’re wrong, but like, *The Five People You Meet in Heaven* as a perfect example, is my first novel.

I guess because I wrote *Tuesdays with Morrie* before it, a lot of people just assumed I was interested in heaven and what happens when you die. That really wasn’t it at all. I wanted to write a book about people who don’t think they matter and that everybody matters.

It was a theme that I knew was universal. I knew I had something to say about it. I really do believe there’s no such thing as a nobody, that everybody touches somebody and touches somebody, and that was the theme. Heaven came into it because that was kind of a cool way to tell the story. Okay, let’s have a guy go to heaven and meet five people from his life, and he finds out the influence that he had on them, and he didn’t even know it. Therefore he finds out that his life had meaning. The theme I was trying to serve was about people who think they don’t matter, and I created the story around it.

So it wasn’t about heaven, and it wasn’t about five people. It wasn’t about war. It wasn’t about anything. Those are the tools that I used to get to the theme. So with *Twice*, my newest book, the theme was how we always think that life would be better if we got a chance to do it over again. We frequently think about that, whether we want to admit it or not, in our relationships and even in our love relationships. You know, there was this girl in high school, if I had only gone out with her more than once, or there was that fleeting moment I had with that stranger on that trip to Europe.

David Perell:

I don’t know the stupid stuff I said to girls in high school. I think I’d be better if I got to go back and do it again.

Mitch Albom:

Well, maybe not you, but other people. I wanted to write something that was about that theme. I try to find themes that are kind of universal.

So then I came up with a story about a guy who has the magical ability to do everything in his life twice. He can go back and undo something and do it again, but he has to live with the consequences of the second try. That was critical to the story because the point that I wanted to make and the North Star that I wanted to sail towards in this book was that there’s a price to pay if you don’t learn a lesson from the mistakes that you make.

We think the price we pay is the mistake we make, but there’s also a price to pay if you don’t make a mistake. If you’re allowed to keep correcting them, you don’t learn what you’re supposed to learn. That’s what the grass is always greener, that’s the flip side of it. If you kept trying greener grass, you’d never really learn to appreciate or how to make do with what you had. So I created a whole story based on that.

I sailed towards that ending because I knew that my character was going to make that mistake. This guy who had the ability to do everything in his life twice, was going to make a mistake with love, and then he finds out that it doesn’t work with love. With love, if someone loves you deeply and truly and you decide to walk away from it to try somebody else, that person can never love you again that way. They’ll be in the world. You can know them, but they just won’t have that feeling anymore. I knew that he was going to make that mistake, and so that was where I sailed towards. I had that in mind from page one.

David Perell:

That’s wonderful. So that premise came out of the theme before it.

Mitch Albom:

That’s right.

David Perell:

Cool. You got me thinking about cool premises now. You got me thinking about Flatland 2D instead of 3D, and Benjamin Button, born old, dies young. What makes for a good premise?

Mitch Albom:

It depends on who you’re trying to reach, I guess. I mean, for me, I want the best thing that somebody can say when they read one of my books isn’t, “Man, that guy’s an artist with the written word.” I’m really not after that. There are way better artists than me, and I’m not even sure I would know what to do with it if somebody said that.

What I want people to say is, “I couldn’t stop thinking about that after I finished it. It made me think about my own life,” not necessarily my characters or anything. It made me think about my own life. Then you’ve done something with your literature. You’ve moved people.

I was very blessed early in my writing career, kind of midway through, to write a book called “Tuesdays With Maury” that was not supposed to be any kind of big book, and it wasn’t supposed to do anything other than pay medical bills for my old college professor. But for whatever reason, the things that he had to say resonated with the readers.

I have been blessed countless times to hear people say to me, “That book affected my life.” It made me go out and do this. It made me reunite with a lost loved one. It made me change my job because I realized my path was going differently. It helped me deal with a terminal illness. It helped me deal with my mother’s terminal illness. I’ve seen what the written word can do in terms of making people think and change their life, and it becomes a very fulfilling thing to be able to aspire to.

Ever since, I’ve tried to write books, recognizing I was never going to do another book like “Tuesdays With Maury”. He was such a unique individual, but if each one of my books can make you think about one theme, the way that “Tuesdays with Maury” makes you think about a lot of themes, then I’ve done something and that’s what I’m after.

So when you say what makes a good theme for me, it’s will people think about it after they’re done reading?

David Perell:

With “Tuesdays With Maury”, I was struck by the idea of actually removing the emotion from it. Like, intuitively, I’d say, “Ah, you tried to make that book as emotional as you possibly could.” It’s a deep story. It’s about death, it’s about grief, it’s about terminal illness, man. Let’s add the emotion. Let’s make it heavy.

Mitch Albom:

Yeah.

David Perell:

And actually you kind of did the opposite, huh?

Mitch Albom:

I did. And that’s a really astute observation because, although the answer may not be what you think, I didn’t have the confidence to do what you suggested that I could do. When I sat down to write Tuesdays with Maury, I remember going out and getting a bunch of books about death that people had written, accounts of people dying, whatever, the best ones, the ones that were recommended.

I started reading them and I said, I can’t do this. They’re way better than me. Look at the poetry that they bring to it, and look at the emotion in their words. What a turn of phrase. I don’t even have that.

I recognized, I guess intuitively at 37, as a sports writer that to try to do that would have been silly. It would have failed, and it would have looked exactly like a cheap attempt to try to write flowery phrases about death when the truth was, as a writer, I wasn’t developed enough to understand that, and as a human being, I was only beginning my journey to understand that.

I mean, I had gone through his dying and we had done that whole last class together, and I was definitely a little more developed than I had been when I first went to go see him. But I wasn’t like I am now, where I could write about the subject. Tuesday morning would come out much differently now if I were writing it almost 30 years later, because I’m a lot closer to Maury’s age now than I was my old age. So I decided I’m going to go the opposite way.

I’m just going to write this as simply as possible. Just write what happened. There doesn’t need to be more. Let Maury carry the story. If you have something to say, say it in one sentence. If you’ve got a point of view or a take on it, say it in one sentence or the last line of the chapter and then move on.

There’s a funny kind of adjunct to that. The contract for the book was a 320 page book. When you sign a contract, they tell you approximately how many words or how many pages they want it to be, and it said 320 pages or something. I was typing, and I just triple spaced it.

David Perell:

Sounds like a school assignment.

Mitch Albom:

That’s the way I looked at it. I’d only written two books before, and they were sports books, and they didn’t care how long they were. They were really reportage books.

I just wrote it, and I got to like 300 pages, and I turned it in. They called me about 10 days later, and they said, we have a problem.

I said, what’s the problem? They said, well, we paginated this. We put this into the computer system, and this is only going to be 160 pages long.

I said, oh, well, that’s all I got. I don’t want to add to it. I don’t have anything. I said what I want to say.

They went off and they thought about it for a while, and they said, all right, we’ve decided we’re going to make it a small book. That way it won’t look like a comic book. That’s why Tuesdays With Maury is as small as it is.

When Tuesdays with Maury became the surprise success, now all my books are that size, no matter how long they are. It was really just because I was trying to write as simply and as bare to the bone as I could.

I once heard somebody said something good about Joan Didion’s writing, who I really admired as a journalist. They said she writes so tightly, it cuts the flesh. When I realized I could not write flowery, I decided, okay, I’m going to write tight and try to see if I can create something that’s good because it just says what needs to be said. Maury did the heavy lifting, and so that’s why that book came out the way it did.

David Perell:

Do you feel like your first drafts are pretty tight, or do you feel like it requires editing, revision? Do you have to scrap that, take the big old red pen in order to tighten it up?

Mitch Albom:

Well, that’s evolved too. So with Tuesdays With Morrie, I wrote the beginning probably 20 times.

I kept turning it in, and they were like, no, I’ll give you another one, no, I’ll give you another one, no, I’ll give you another one. Finally, they said to me, why are you torturing yourself over these 10 pages here?

I said, well, because if they—actually, it wasn’t even 10, it was like the first page, first two pages. I said, well, if I don’t get them on the first page, they’re not going to read past it.

I remember my editor, Bill Thomas, said to me, you’re thinking like a sportswriter writing a sports column. They’re not reading a newspaper. If they pick up a book, they’re going to give you a few pages. They’re not going to read the first paragraph and say, this is not for me. They’ll have spent money on it. They’ll give you a little bit, even if they’re standing in a bookstore, they’ll read a couple of pages.

That was good advice because it relaxed me a little bit. I tried so hard to make the first page perfect. So then I became like, okay, I just have to get them in the first 10 pages. I don’t have to get them in the first page. I loosened up a little bit about that.

But I still write; I self-edit all the time. I always say by the time I’m done with my book, if you catch me right when I’ve just finished a book, if you start me, I can probably recite it. I don’t even need to look at it because I have reread it that many times that I can tell you what comes next, and the next sentence after the next, and the next sentence.

So I do a lot of that combing and raking before I ever let an editor see it, because I really don’t want it coming back with, like, you don’t need this, you don’t need this, you don’t need this. It hurts to be told you’re too fat. I’d rather go out and work out and lose the weight before I show up. I want to come in skinny.

So I do self-edit a lot, and then after I turn in a draft, I edit even more. After the second draft, I edit more. I am almost always taking out. Once in a blue moon, I’ll throw in an additional line, but almost all, you know, the second draft, third draft, fourth draft, right until the publisher is literally pulling it out of my hands and saying, you do understand that as of 5:00, you can’t touch this anymore because it’s going to the publisher, right? Just one more, just one more edit.

David Perell:

Give me till 5:02.

Mitch Albom:

Yeah, that’s what I’m like.

David Perell:

You hit your deadlines.

Mitch Albom:

I’ve learned deadlines have become really part of my bloodstream. As a sports writer, which I still do for the Detroit Free Press, even though it’s more of an emeritus kind of thing now, back in the day when I was really at it, I write for the Detroit Free Press. We’re in the Eastern time zone, but Michigan, the state that I live in, is a very big state. Our printing presses, some of them are way up north in the Upper Peninsula, and some are south. Consequently, we had some of the earliest deadlines in America for nighttime writing, because to get the paper delivered, printed, and taken up to some of these places, you’ve got to turn it in early because it’s five, six, seven hours away.

I got used to writing as a sports writer. Most games back then started at like 7:00 at night, 7:30, and they would end, maybe a game started at 8:00 and it would end at 10:30. My first deadline was 8:00, so the game hasn’t even barely started yet. I had a deadline. My second deadline was like 9:45, which maybe the game might just be coming to some conclusion. The third one was like 11:00 or 11:30. The fourth one was like 1:00 AM. So I was constantly writing and rewriting.

There was a championship game between the Detroit Pistons and the Portland Trailblazers out on the West Coast, and they had extended the deadlines. They said you have to send it when the buzzer sounds. That’s all you’ve got to do to try to make the paper.

The game changed leads in the last three or four minutes, and I literally had, and this was a very common thing, a winning column and a losing column going at the same time. They were up three games to one, so if they had lost, it would have just meant it’s 3-2, not that big a thing. You’ve got to come back and play another game. If they had won, they win the NBA Championship, big difference in tone.

I am literally going back and forth with every basket, every time the Pistons take a lead, Pistons win, and then switch and switch the screen, go over. Pistons lose. This is what happens. With 0.07 seconds left on the clock, Vinnie Johnson hit the shot that won the game. I had to write something in that split seconds, some semblance of something. As I pressed the button, the fans jumped over my back to storm the court because it’s just pandemonium when it was over.

You realize as you’re sending this thing off, which is this garbled jumble of running, that not only did you just send in something that you’re not particularly probably proud of, but they’re going to make a poster out of it and sell it so that kids everywhere will have it on their wall and they’ll look up and they’ll say, boy, that album guy really can’t write very well.

I had to live with those kind of deadlines, and that was a big part of my life for many years, so I’m quite used to deadlines. I don’t miss them. My book editor’s always like, you actually turn stuff in on the day that it’s supposed to be turned in. I go, well, doesn’t everybody do that? Oh, God, no. Novelists are notorious for waiting, being six months late or a year late. I said, you got the wrong guy.

David Perell:

Part of that must be that you’re pretty regimented about your process. Three hours, get up in the morning. Don’t wait for the inspiration to strike so that the inspiration comes.

Mitch Albom:

Yeah, I think some of that comes from a journalism background, too. You have to write every day whether you feel like it or not, or you have to go cover that game whether you feel like it or not. You have to spin some story out of something, something that might not be that interesting a game. I was well trained in that. I learned from some really good writers.

David Perell:

Like a music band?

Mitch Albom:

Yeah, a music band.

David Perell:

And everyone’s a writer.

Mitch Albom:

It’s called the Rock Bottom Remainders. We’ve been playing for 30 years already. Stephen King, Amy Tan, Dave Barry, Scott Turow, Ridley Pearson, James McBride, and Frank McCourt were in it. Many writers have come and gone through as guests, but that’s kind of the core.

I’ll talk to them sometimes about how they do it, but we don’t spend a lot of time talking about writing, to be honest. We mostly talk about what chord we got wrong.

But when we do talk about writing, what I’ve observed is everybody kind of approaches it like a job. There was only one guy, Greg Isles, who’s a wonderful guy and just passed away. It would hit him at two in the morning, and he’d get up from 2:00 a.m. until 11:00 a.m., and he’d say, “Don’t bother me; I’m on a roll.”

But pretty much everybody else was like, get up, go to the office, write, open a vein, let it bleed, as Red Smith said, and then come back the next day and do it. So I learned that you have to treat it like a job. I learned that you should recognize how big your gas tank is and pretty much don’t try to outrun your gas tank.

For me, as you mentioned, it’s about three hours. I get about three hours of writing a day. I start first thing in the morning. I deliberately don’t listen. I get up and maybe I’ll grab something to drink, a cup of coffee or something, and then go right down to the screen and start writing. No music, no news, no emails, no Internet, nothing that could start to stain the weight of my imagination. I just do those first three hours without taking any phone calls or doing anything else.

It starts usually like 7:00 or whatever, and by 10:00, I’m done. I could sit there and make everybody feel good about my sitting there until 5:00, but I won’t get anything more. So I’ve learned that’s about all I’m going to get, but try to leave on a positive note. Try to leave the room while you’re in the middle of a good sentence or a good paragraph.

David Perell:

Don’t stop stuck.

Mitch Albom:

Yeah, force yourself to stop in the middle of a sentence that you really want to finish. Then, when you wake up the next morning, you’re excited to get back down and go do it. Whereas if you stop when you’re stuck or you stop when things aren’t going well, you get up in the morning and your first thought is, “No, that again. I’m going to go back to that crap.” So that’s a little trick that I use.

I do it pretty much every day, especially when I’m working on a book. Seven days a week is normal for me.

David Perell:

You know, we’re talking about stories, and many years ago, you did an interview. You’re talking about a story about the Kennedy assassination and how most people covered the story in one way, but there was one guy, Dean May Breslin, who went to the grave-digging guy.

Mitch Albom:

When I talk to people about journalism, and particularly about column writing, I always say that the ones people are going to remember are often the ones that are away from the main action. If you can somehow tell the story through that, you’re going to create a memorable column or piece of journalism.

The one that you’re referring to was Jimmy Breslin, who at the time I guess was writing for the Daily News. When JFK was killed, everybody in the country who had a column was writing about what it meant to America. They were writing all these declarative sentences and paragraphs about how this is a turning point in America, or who are we? Or blah, blah, blah, grandiose thoughts.

He went to the cemetery and found the guy who was digging the grave for John F. Kennedy. The guy was very meticulous, saying it has to be just right. This is for the President. He just talked about the small details of the sod or the hole that he was digging. Through this one guy, you captured everything that all those other people were trying to write.

You captured the grief, the soul of the nation, and what it meant to everybody, but you did it through a guy whose sole job it was was to prepare the hole that Kennedy’s body was going to go in. That’s a great way to tell that story differently than everybody else did.

David Perell:

You got me thinking a lot about perspective, point of view. One of the most embarrassing moments, like, if I were to look back at my life and ask at what point did I feel the most shame, would be freshman year of college.

I ran the local news sports division. It was the beginning of the football season, and I’m up in the box. Elon, where I went to school, the home team scored a touchdown. I said, yeah. And all the reporters said, shh.

Mitch Albom:

Yeah, shh.

David Perell:

You’re not supposed to...

Mitch Albom:

No cheering in the press box.

David Perell:

I didn’t know this exactly. No cheering in the press box. I thought, oh, my goodness.

All this is to say that from that moment, it’s obvious to me that there is a “no cheering in the press box” kind of mentality in a bunch of sports journalism.

Then I think back at two sports writers that I like. I think of Bill Simmons, an ardent Red Sox fan. Then I think my favorite piece of sports journalism of all time is David Foster Wallace, “Federer’s Religious Experience,” where he’s just talking about the art, the beauty, the wonder, the magic of watching that guy hit a tennis ball.

What I’m thinking about here is counter positioning. What is the normal thing? You’re talking about who is the different kind of person that you focus on. A lot of sports journalism recently, a lot of the growth, has come from people saying, you know what? No, I’m a fan of this team, I’m a fan of this sport, and I’m gonna let my radiant enthusiasm come through the words.

Mitch Albom:

The reason there’s no cheering in the press box was intended to just sort of create a working environment for journalists to focus. It became, though, kind of a mantra of almost an attitude: “Don’t cheer for the home team.”

I always thought that was silly, and that sportswriters who complained about their jobs were basically committing suicide. For whatever reason, I always recognized early on and never made the mistake of complaining about my job that I had a job that everyone who was reading me wanted.

To them, getting to go into the locker room wasn’t about scrums and getting stuck around a guy who you can’t hear, or getting cursed at by an 18-year-old, or the smell, or getting run over by camera people. It was, wow, I get to be amongst my heroes. You get to be amongst my heroes. You have a job that I want. You get to go sit in a press play. You get tickets to every single game. You don’t have to buy them. You don’t have to sit out in the cheap seat.

David Perell:

You ever been to a champagne popping ceremony?

Mitch Albom:

Oh my God, yeah. Been. I’ve been soaked by it. And by the way, it’s not fun.

David Perell:

It’s not fun.

Mitch Albom:

Yeah.

Mitch Albom:

Champagne burns, and it’s not fun. I’ve had champagne dumped on me, and I’ve had a bucket of ice dumped on me by an angry pitcher, so I’ve been at both ends of that spectrum. I know not to complain about the position because it is a fantasy for a lot of people.

No cheering in the press box shouldn’t mean no enthusiasm for the home team. Being dispassionate about sports doesn’t make sense, because why are you even playing them unless there’s passion? It’s just a game otherwise. If it doesn’t mean something and you aren’t invested in it, or it means something to you to root for your home team, then who cares? It’s a ball getting kicked around or being hit with a bat.

I always knew that the passion belonged there, and I never worried about being a homer or anything like that. I just tried to write what was honest. If it was honest that everyone in town was excited about it, then that’s what you wrote. I was very blessed that I worked in Detroit. Detroit is not a cynical place like New York or Philadelphia or Boston.

David Perell:

Burns with passion, that place.

Mitch Albom:

Yeah, it’s a great sports town, and they love their team. They don’t mind loving their teams, and they’re not going to boo Santa Claus like they do in Philadelphia.

The well-known sports journalists in the history of Detroit didn’t cut their teeth by being mean to the teams. They cut their teeth actually by leading the cheers for the teams, so I was lucky. I worked in a town like that and still do, and I much prefer it.

It’s hard to be cynical all the time. It’s hard to be angry all the time. It takes a lot of energy to find the ugliness in what you’re watching. I’d much rather find the beauty and the joy. Our city was down for so long, so much of my career. Detroit has been in the crapper.

Sports for us was a chance to have some happy moments, and once in a while, to get some national respect. I’ve always been a little defensive about Detroit and happy to lead the cheers when we had something to cheer about, when the Red Wings were winning and when the Pistons were winning.

David Perell:

And now the Lions, baby.

Mitch Albom:

Now the Lions. Yeah. Now the Lions.

David Perell:

Here they come.

Mitch Albom:

Yeah.

David Perell:

Tell me this. How do you think about characters? You’re developing a character. What are the things that you’re focused on?

Mitch Albom:

Well, I think the answer to that is first you need to specify. Are you talking about the main character or ancillary characters? So my main character has to go through some kind of transformation, or it’s not interesting. There has to be a difference in him at the beginning versus the end, or her, or whoever it is.

So then it’s like, okay, where are we going to start, and where are we going to get to? In The Five People You Meet in Heaven, I started with a guy who’s an 83-year-old maintenance worker at an amusement park who thinks he’s done nothing with his life, that he’s a nobody, that he’s never been anywhere, and he’s just waiting to die.

He does die that day trying to save a little girl from an accident, from a falling cart that was about to crush her. He goes to push her out of the way, and he feels her little hands in his hands, and then everything goes black. He wakes up in heaven and finds out that the first stage of heaven is you meet five people from your life, some of whom you might know well, some of whom might be total strangers, but each one tells you about something that you did that changed them forever or changed you forever.

Now I know I got him at the beginning. I spent a lot of time in the first chapter just setting up little lonely moments. He pulls a string out of a fishing hole that they have cut in the bottom of the boardwalk, and there’s nothing on it, and he says, “There’s never anything on it.” He goes outside and falls asleep with the sound of seagulls going overhead, kind of a lonely sort of moment. He hears a song that he and his wife used to dance to, and he remembers her. Then he wakes up and realizes he has a doctor’s appointment, and he has shingles. All these little things just kind of set the tone that he’s alone, that he’s sad, that he feels like he’s a nobody.

So now I’ve established where I want to begin him, and in my mind, I kind of know where I want to end him. The process is, how do I change him along the way to get him to where I want him to be?

Same thing with Twice, the new book. It’s the same kind of thing. Same character starts a certain way. In Twice, the new book, it begins with him already older, and he’s been arrested for allegedly cheating at a roulette wheel in a casino in the Bahamas and winning three straight numbers with the exact number, which is impossible. I mean, the odds are infinitesimal, crazy.

A cop is interrogating him, a detective about, “How’d you do it? Come on, how’d you do it? How’d you do it?” He says, “I didn’t do anything.” “Come on, how’d you do it?” “I didn’t do anything.” “What’s your story? What’s your story?” Finally, under pressure, he takes out this notebook that he has written for somebody else to be read upon his death. You realize he’s dying, and he gives it to the cop. He says, “If you really want to know, you can read this out loud.” They go through it together.

So with him, I’ve already established him at the end, and now you’re going to read from the beginning how he changed and got there. There’s a lot of angles from which you can do this. You can either start with the person a certain way and put the idea in the reader’s mind, “How did he get that way? How did he become that?” Then you show the contrast from the beginning all the way in. Or you start with a very innocent kind of person, like in Frankie Presto. The Magic Strings of Frankie Presto is about his magical guitar player that starts when he’s a little boy, an infant, and literally goes linearly all the way to the end. You watch him change along the way.

There’s lots of starting points, but it’s a transformation for me. Your characters have to transform. It’s not interesting if they don’t. Nobody wants to read 200, 300 pages about the same person who’s the same way as they were in chapter one as they are at the end, no matter how interesting they may be. It gets repetitive. You have to change.

David Perell

How much do you feel like I’m writing for Mitch versus I’m writing for a reader?

Mitch Albom:

98% writing for readers.

David Perell:

Is that right?

Mitch Albom:

Yeah.

David Perell:

So how does that manifest itself?

Mitch Albom:

I don’t worry about what interests me per se. I like oldies music. If you ask me what’s a passion of mine, I like 50s doo-wop rock and roll.

I was in a band years ago that played it. I love listening to it. I listen to it almost every day. I’m not writing a book about doo-wop music because I don’t really see a great way to make that interesting to a large number of readers. First of all, music’s very difficult. I wrote one music book, which I threw myself into because music’s a passion of mine.

But it’s tough because the beauty, the real beauty of music is oral. It’s hard to write down. No matter what words you use and how many, if you want to write like Tom Wolfe with a lot of italics and try to write the beat out, it doesn’t matter. It’s really hard to get it across.

So that’s a passion of mine, but I’m not going to write it. I think about things that people want to explore in themselves. Then I say, are these things that I have something to say about, or I have some knowledge about, or I’m curious about myself? Those themes that I told you about, when those overlap, when one that I’m curious about or I’ve learned something about overlaps with something that I think readers will be curious about too, that makes the list. What doesn’t make the list is just because I’m interested in it.

Maybe people think that that’s wrong, and you should write what you love. But it’s a business. You’re putting out books and you’re trying to get people to go read books, and it takes you a year or two of your life to do it. I guess I’m just used to writing for an audience. The newspaper business is an audience. The movie business is an audience. You write a play; you’re literally writing it for an audience.

I remember that line in Tootsie with Bill Murray, and he’s a playwright. He goes, “I want to write a play that nobody comes to see.” Yeah, all right, that would be great. If people come and see it, then it’s trash, it’s failed. All right, well, that’s why it was a funny line in a movie, but it’s not a way to run your career.

David Perell:

So what is the process of coming up with a theme, a premise, a book idea? What does that look like?

Mitch Albom:

When I get an idea for a book or a concept, I write it down, or I send myself an email. I’m frequently in places where I would try to write it on a piece of paper, and then I just lose the pieces of paper. I once had a whole bag of little pieces of yellow paper that I scrunched up or stuffed with notes. I’d write to myself at night when I woke up and got an idea.

Now, because of email, phones, and everything, I just email myself and tag the subject line “book idea.”

So, every couple of months, I search my book ideas, pull them, print them, and put them into a file. Now I have a file that’s inches thick. Sometimes it’s a whole theme, a story, sometimes it’s a line, sometimes it’s a title. Sometimes it’s like, “this would make a great first line for a book.” I just collect them in those files.

When the time comes to write another book, like now, when I already have a new book coming out, and it’s time to start thinking about what I want to do next, I’ll leaf through that file and find something. I’m blessed not to ever suffer from writer’s block. That’s never been a thing for me.

Maybe you’re not allowed to when you’re under deadline all the time. It’s that famous story about Dick Young here in New York about the World Series, Don Larson’s Perfect Game. The story goes that Dick Young was a sports writer for the New York Post. He was sitting there, and the guy next to him, after Don Larson finished his Perfect Game, froze and couldn’t come up with anything. He said, “Oh my God, I don’t have anything. It’s deadline.” Dick Young got so frustrated that he was interrupting him that he grabbed his typewriter and wrote, “The imperfect man through the perfect game,” because Larson had some issues or whatever. He gave him his thing back and said, “There, start.” That became a famous first line of this guy’s story.

I don’t have that luxury, and I will run out of years on this earth long before I run out of that file of story ideas.

David Perell:

There was a fun idea that I saw around. You frame the same thing in two different ways, and one has the spice of life, a little spark of action and flavor, and the other one will be dull.

For example, you could say, “This second baseman’s batting .333,” or you could say, “One in three times, when this guy walks up to the plate, something good happens.”

Mitch Albom:

That’s what I always said.

David Perell:

I love that. It’s completely the story philosophy, showing up in the smallest place. It’s like fractal or something.

Mitch Albom:

Well, I said that. I don’t know if you’re quoting me.

David Perell:

I am.

Mitch Albom:

I remember I gave a talk about how you write about sports, and I always said that I wanted to write for the die-hard sports fan who is going to read you, no matter what. They may hate you, but they’ll still read you because they’re going to read everything. But I wanted to write for that grandmother in North Carolina who’d never seen a Detroit game or whatever and still could read my column and get it.

Most importantly, that meant picking a theme that the person could identify with. So write about humanity. Write about overcoming loss or overcoming strife, whatever it is. A subset of that was don’t get lost in the weeds about statistics and things like that, which a lot of sports writers, especially now with analytics, WAR, and all this ridiculous analytic overanalyzing things do. It’s like reading a spreadsheet. You’re reading the whip and this and that. I said, for example, if a guy hits .333, don’t say that. Say one out of every three times he comes to the plate, something good happens. That’s how everybody can relate to it.

Even more importantly than the factual stuff, find the thematic stuff that everybody can relate to. I’ll give you a perfect example. Stop me if you’ve heard me tell this story before, but sometimes that means that you have to go against the grain of your business. I was in Barcelona at the Olympics, and Carl Lewis was going to run in 100-meter final. It was a Saturday, and everybody was going to watch his race, including me. I went there early because I knew that it was going to be really crowded, and stadiums get packed at the Olympics, and I wanted to get a good seat for 100 meters is a short race.

I got there at like 3:00 in the afternoon, and I’m just sitting there waiting five hours. Meanwhile, they’re running some heats. One of the heats was like a 400-meter heat, and those are just countless parade of athletes coming out and running a heat and another heat and another heat. I’m leaning like this watching, and the gun goes off. They race, and about halfway around the track, this one runner pulls up hamstring and goes down to the track. Okay, happens all the time, especially if you cover track and field. Everyone else keeps running and they finish the race, and this guy is in his lane and you can see he’s suffering, and he gets up and he falls back down and he really tore something.

Then suddenly out of the blue, a kind of heavyset guy comes running out of the stands and onto the field. Remember, this is pre-9/11, so security isn’t what it was afterwards. He runs onto the track and he gets behind this guy, and he lifts him up.

David Perell:

Oh wow.

Mitch Albom:

He starts walking him in the lane around the track. At some point when they come around the final curve, he actually has him up on his feet. So his feet are behind him, and each step that he’s taking, he’s kind of walking because they’re staying within the lane. If you go outside the lane, you are disqualified. There’s not room for him to put his legs, so they have to get both their legs lined up.

He’s literally carrying him. As he’s starting to come around the curve, everyone in the stadium is cheering him on. By the time he gets across the track, everybody gives him a big round of applause.

Let’s say the winner won in 50 seconds or 49 seconds. He came around in two and a half minutes.

I go running downstairs; there are only a handful of journalists there. I try to find this guy, and I see the guy who ran out of the stands. Me and a handful of other reporters race up to him. I said, “Who are you? Why did you do that?”

He said, “I’m his father.”

I asked, “Why did you run out of the stands?”

He goes, “I know how hard he trained. He’s trained his whole life for this, and I knew that if he didn’t cross the finish line, he wouldn’t be recorded as having participated in the Olympics. His name might not be in the books, so I knew he just had to finish.”

I started asking him questions about his background. He said, “I taught him how to run. When he was little—”

I said, “Why’d you put him on your feet?”

He said, “When he was a little boy, I taught him how to run. That’s how I taught him. I put his feet on my feet.” I’m choking up when I’m telling the story. “I put his feet on my feet, and that’s how I taught him how to run, and so I remembered that. So that’s what we did.”

I came back upstairs and called my newspaper. I said, “I’m not writing this Carl Lewis thing; I got a better story.”

They go, “What do you mean? It’s Carl Lewis!”

I said, “Trust me, this is a better story.”

At the time, nobody had seen it. Now everybody tells this story, and they all act like they were there, but I was there, and there weren’t 10 million reporters there.

I wrote that story instead or in addition to, and that column became one of the best-known columns that I’ve written. It was about a guy who I’d never heard of before. Derek Redmond is his name. I’d never heard of him; he was British, never heard of the father. Nobody in America cared about this guy. Nobody knew the race or anything, but everybody could relate to that story. It was about a father with his son, not wanting to see his son have his heart broken. That is every father and every son and every child repeated over again. If you can find that, that’s gold. That’s a column that you want to write no matter what else is out there.

David Perell:

How do you think about when you’re telling a story, writing a story? What happens next? How do you think about that problem?

Mitch Albom:

Some of it is pacing. Some of it, you think almost like a movie. Have I had a lot of action? Do I need a counteraction?

When I wrote the book *The Little Liar*, which was set during the Holocaust, there was a lot of stuff in the first third of the book about the war years. It’s all set in Greece and when the Nazis invaded, the Jews were put into the ghetto, and then the trains. There was a lot of very big thematic life-and-death kind of stuff.

I remember talking with my editor. She said, “I wouldn’t change any of it, but it’s just so much. The reader feels overwhelmed by all these terrible acts and things that are happening.”

I said, “Yeah, you’re right.”

So I went back in, and I inserted a little scene about the grandfather taking the kids up to a tower in Thessalonica on a special field trip day for a birthday. It was a thing called the White Tower, and they get to the top, and all the kids are having this great time because they got to go in and go all the way to the top of the tower. The grandfather explains to them that it used to be called the Red Tower and that it used to be a prison. It was called the Red Tower because they used to throw people off the roof of it, and they would die and the red from the blood.

The kid says, “Well, how did it become the White Tower?”

He says, “There was a man who was imprisoned. The tower itself was so dirty from all these killings and all the rest of it that the town wanted it painted, but nobody wanted to paint because it was too tough a job. It was this massive, huge tower, and nobody wanted to do it. This prisoner offered to do it by himself if they would set him free. Because he had been imprisoned for a crime of passion or something with his wife, they let him do it, and he painted the whole tower by himself, and they set him free.”

The grandfather says to his grandson, “What do you learn from that?”

He said, “A man to be forgiven will do anything.”

It was this quiet, kind of sweet sort of moment. The insertion of it amidst these other things was what made it work. If I had put it someplace else, it would have been out of place or unnecessary or would have been a deviation, but because we needed to take a breath, it worked. It ended up serving a purpose for the story much later on.

Sometimes you’re monitoring the heart of your reader. Is their heartbeat getting too fast? Is it starting to be, instead of a healthy run, a scary experience where I need to stop? So bring it down a little bit. Take the hill out of the marathon that we were talking about earlier. Flatten it out a little bit.

A lot of it is pace, and you have to have a feel for that as a storyteller.

Then a lot of it is crescendo. Nobody wants to peak too soon; nobody wants to peak too late. You don’t want to save everything good for the last chapter of the book.

I learn a lot from movie-making because I write movies, and it’s quite a different experience. Bill Goldman’s book *Adventures in the Screen Trade*. He explains that more action happens in the last seven minutes of a movie than often happens in the first hour and a half of it. Yet, as the viewer, you accept that because we’ve come to expect our movies to have these big wrap-ups. If you actually measure it, it’s like seven minutes. The love story wraps up, the murder wraps up, the case wraps up, and nobody objects to it because you’re ready for it. That’s the experience of the moviegoer.

You also have to understand the experience of a reader. When do they want some relief? When do they want some humor? When do you break a chapter? That’s a big thing. How do you hang? I work a lot at stopping the story at a particular point and leaving, putting a pin in it and coming back over here and having people go, “I want to get back to that.” Well, you’re going to have to wait a second. Going to have to wait. It’s like my uncle’s at the dinner table. “There we were. We were over the hill, but first, over here.”

If you’re good, you can keep them bouncing up in the air over here, and you can do something over here as well.

David Perell:

Yeah, I have the image of a color wheel, as you were saying, that color wheel.

David Perell:

It’s sort of riding and sort of in different colors. I’ve been on blue for a long time. I’m kind of getting to that deep blue. It’s a little much now.

I’m going to flip over to orange. Orange is the contrast to blue. The blue amplifies the orange, and the orange amplifies the blue. Then we can keep working our way around the color wheel.

Mitch Albom:

Very much. That’s exactly it. And then it becomes three dimensional if you want to work about time.

If you’re telling multiple stories, as I do in Twice, for example, you’ve got to end one chapter with a suggestion that we’re going to go to some other time, but it’s going to make sense that this comes now.

You know, he looked at the tombstone, and it made him think of his mother. Or he just looked at the tombstone and he was overwhelmed with the memory.

Stop. Next chapter. Now he’s with his mother when he was a kid or something like that. So there’s some sort of tie between where you left off in that scene and why you’re beginning in the next one.

Every book’s different. There are books that are told in multiple voices. That’s a challenge: When do you go from one to the next? When do you return? How long has it been since we’ve heard from that last person? Do we come back?

There are ones that are told in two different centuries, so when do you tell one in this century and when do you go back? There are ones that are told backwards, like Memento, that movie, which kind of worked its way backwards. That’s a challenge, and you have to tell that a certain way.

It all depends on the structure that you’ve chosen, but all of it in my mind is about rhythm.

This is why I think I’ve been blessed, as I didn’t realize as a writer, but to have been a musician. I have an innate sense of rhythm in my speaking, in my writing, in my music writing, and all that.

You sort of know when you’re on a roll, when things are going, and when you’re not. My wife made this observation many years ago, and she’s very astute.

She said, “When you write,” and sometimes she would sit in my office, “When you write, you rock back and forth, but sometimes you stop. What’s going on when you stop?”

I thought about it. I said, “It’s not working when I stop. When I’m doing this, it’s working.”

So I can read a paragraph that I’m working on, or I can write it, and it’s good. But all of a sudden, if it’s not, what do I have to do here? Stop. Okay, I got to fix something. It’s not…

Hold up, everybody stop. Stop the ride. We’re going to hammer a few things in here. Okay, let’s go back.

That’s how when I told you I reread and I reread. A lot of it is just for rhythm.

One of the highest compliments I’ve ever gotten in my newspaper life was when people say, “When I read your column, I start and I’m at the end already. With so many other ones I read, I have to stop and I have to go back and read the paragraph again because I lost something. I don’t know what it is about yours, but I start at the beginning and I kind of just get right to the end.”

I know what it is. It’s rhythm. You write with a rhythm that doesn’t disturb the readers’ sense of rhythm as they’re reading it, and they just can keep going. The sentences make sense. They flow into one another. The ideas flow into one another. Even the cadence of the actual rhythm sentence itself flows into it, and you can get to the bottom. You get to the end of the song, and writing is like that, too.

David Perell:

What I like about rhythm as an idea is that it’s pre-intellectual. If I’m at a bar or a coffee shop and there’s a song that I like, my body knows that I like it before my mind does. My body’s kind of moving and grooving and shaking.

Then I’ll even feel my foot tapping.

Mitch Albom:

Then you’ll go, “What is this?”

David Perell:

I actually like this song. Alright, what’s going on? Okay, let’s go listen to the words.

That’s what I like about music: There’s a whole sequencing with falling in love with the song that goes from the body, the intuitive self, to the mind and the sort of explicit part of the music.

Mitch Albom:

That’s why on American Bandstand, that was always the first thing that they always said when they rated the records: “I liked the beat.”

That’s why Paul Simon, when he was interviewed—and I consider him one of the great songwriters of our time, maybe the best—he said he starts with the rhythm.

Paul Simon is one of the most poetic songwriters we have, but he starts with the percussion and the rhythm of it and writes to it. That’s why I think so many of his compositions are so beautiful because they’re a meshing of the rhythmic with the lyrical. He’ll repeat a line just because it works with the rhythm. There’s no real reason to repeat it, but he’ll work with the rhythm.

It’s hard to explain without playing it for you, but, “Right or wrong? Oh, right or wrong? It never helped us get along. You say you care for me, but there’s no tenderness beneath your honesty.”

That’s a beautiful little meshing of words and rhythm. You don’t even realize it, but if you break it down, why did he repeat, “Right or wrong?” He said it twice, and it never helped us get along. That’s not really the same pattern as this, but it has a certain beat to it. He can do that a thousand times in a thousand songs, and that’s real artistry. It makes it look simple, but it’s not simple. There’s nothing simple about it.

David Perell:

Music and comedy are both very similar.

Mitch Albom:

Yeah, they are.

David Perell:

If it works, it works. We don’t need to explain why it works in music.

If they’re tapping their feet, and in comedy, you’re getting the laugh, it works. Don’t mess with it. It doesn’t need to fit into some tidy little framework that Ms. Whoever taught you in fourth grade or that you’ll read in the formal writing book or whatever. If it works, just stick with it.

Mitch Albom:

That’s right. You can’t even explain why it works, but it works.

David Perell:

I had a teacher in high school that we did this one-week thing called intercession, where we’d take a break from the semester. We’d just do one class for one week. It was a hip-hop class. The teacher, a cool guy, had an unreal style, but he spoke with a stutter, a really bad stutter.

I’ll never forget: if you gave him a good beat, he could freestyle like no one’s business. I was like, what? The guy who speaks with a stutter is also the best freestyler I’d ever met. It was strange, but it was like the beat...

Mitch Albom:

Something liberated him.

David Perell:

Yeah, something liberated him. It took hold of him. It was like the opposite of having a demon inside of you. It was like, “Here we go!”

Mitch Albom:

Writers and songwriters search for that, and when they hit it, they’ve struck gold. You have a magical sentence or paragraph, that last paragraph of *A River Runs Through It*, where he says, “In the end, all things in the world come into one, and a river runs through it. There are stones beneath the river, and the stones are stories, and sometimes the stories of their own. I am haunted by waters.”

I don’t know why that works, why that’s so beautiful, but it’s such a... I mean, the story is about a pastor and two brothers, and one of them who dies and all the rest. In the end, all things come into one, and a river runs through it.

There’s something beautiful about it. I don’t know, but you can’t read that and not say, “Wow, that’s just poetry.” But I couldn’t tell you how he came up with it. Norman Maclean—I don’t know. He probably couldn’t have either. It just happened.

David Perell:

When you wrote your book about faith, was there anything you picked up from religious writing that you admired seeped into your own work?

Mitch Albom:

Yeah, that’s an interesting question. I think when you write about faith, and particularly when you write about God, if you write from an honest place, then there has to be a certain humility in your writing because you should be humble in the face of God and in the face of creation. When you are humble, I find, for me anyhow, I think that’s when your writing becomes most beautiful because you’re able not to think about ego or yourself or whatever. You’re kind of caught up in the majesty of life.

One of my favorite books is “Gilead” by Marilynne Robinson, and it’s the story of a pastor writing a letter to his very young son as he’s about to die, the older pastor, and trying to just sort of tell him why he lived and what meant things to him. There’s so much of it is because he’s a pastor, and so much of it is humility in the face of God. The writing is just exquisite and beautiful.

At one point, he writes about walking through the woods and seeing some young people playing with water or a hose, and the drops are coming off of the trees and landing on them, and they’re giggling. He just describes it so beautifully, and then he says, “Oh, this world. Oh, this world. Oh, the beauty of this world.” It comes from such a simple little observation of people enjoying themselves and laughing, but you can tell he’s dying and he’s going to miss these things from the world. It’s some kind of sentence like, “Oh, oh the beauty of this world. Oh, this world.”

When you are humble like that, and when you are admiring God’s work, I believe your words take on a beauty that it’s hard to create when you’re just thinking about, how can I, the writer, write something really beautiful? That’s why some of the most beautiful writing in the world is in the Psalms. What were the Psalms? They were mostly David trying to ask for help from God.

Many of them are pleas for help against his enemies or living or whatever, but some are just extolling the beauty of God or the beauty of the world or whatever. Look at some of that writing. I mean, this stuff was being scratched on stone, and it still holds up and is beautiful.

I’ve not really been asked that before, but I think when you write about religious themes in a particular fashion, not in a dispassionate, analytical one, but when you’re really are bringing God or faith into your work, if you’re doing it correctly, that humility opens up your ability to look at things in a marveling way. When you marvel at something, you use a different language.

David Perell:

It’s marvel, it’s mystery, it’s awe. What I love about those is they’re stretching. They kind of reach right at the horizon of what we can sense and feel.

There’s an understanding that there’s something beyond that horizon, something that we’re grasping towards. You think of the Sistine Chapel, the reaching, the two fingertips are almost hitting each other, and there’s that gap, and you’re trying to reach out, almost dislocating your shoulder.

The abyss, the frontier, is kind of infinite, and it’s beyond you. It’s in a different paradigm, and it’s like the quest for that. You’re right. When it’s humble, it’s not coming from you. It’s coming from something. You’re being pulled. You find words, phrases, music within yourself that you’re kind of unsure where it came from.

Mitch Albom:

I wrote a book called *Have a Little Faith*, which is about a rabbi and an inner-city pastor. The rabbi had asked me to do his eulogy for him. When he finally died, I had gone to visit him a bunch of times to learn about him so that I could do his eulogy.

In his office, he had a bunch of files. It was a messy, sloppy thing of an office, but he had all these files all around. Up on the top shelf, when I would go and sit down, I always looked up and there was a file called “God.” It just said “God,” along with Genesis and Moses.

I would look at that and I would wonder what was in that thing. What’s in the file on God?

Did you ever find out?

Yes, I wrote about it in the book. After he died, I went back to his office and I took the file off the shelf. I held it for a minute. I flashed back on that Indiana Jones movie when they have the ark. I thought, “If I open this, some sand is going to come up and blow in my face. The glory of God is revealed to me. My skin’s going to melt off.”

I opened it, and it was just all these notes and Xerox pages and little passages about God that the rabbi had assembled over the years with little things underlined and questions about, “What about this?”

At first, I was like, “That’s it.” Then I realized, “That’s perfect,” because what is God if not a series of questions and the answers that we believe that we either are hearing or we one day will hear? It’s the journey. It’s not the answer.

He did an amazing thing when he died. He had recorded a tape, unbeknownst to anybody. When he died, his grandson, he had left it for his grandson. His grandson at the funeral service went up to the pulpit and put this cassette tape into a player on a speaker and pressed play.

His voice came out. He spoke to the congregation, the rabbi’s voice, and he said, “My friends, if you are hearing this tape, that means I’m dead and gone. Please don’t feel sorry for me. I want to say one last thing before I go. I’ve had two questions that have been asked of me over the course of my life as a rabbi more than any others. The first is, do I believe in God? My answer is yes. The second is, what happens when we die? The good news is, by the time you hear this, I’ll know. The bad news is, now that I know I can’t tell you. You’re going to have to find out for yourself.”

I just thought that that was so perfect because that is what faith is. You don’t know. If you knew, there’d be no reason for faith. It’s the journey to get there. When you finally do know, it’s going to be at a point where you’re not going to be able to tell everybody else.

I do think when you can put yourself into that frame of mind and you can write in that area, different words come out. I have explored the idea of doing a book about a biblical character, if I could find one that hasn’t been so overdone, and set it in that thing, but then write about some part of them. I thought about Job maybe, but write about a part of them that wasn’t in the. You use the historical context of it, but outside of that, then you create your own story for that person only because of that time and that era and that belief.

I think it would allow me to operate in. Like, I’d be playing with toys that I don’t get to play with all the time, and I do think it’s a healthy exercise to be humbled and to learn how to write with humility. So that may be one of the things in the books in the future.

David Perell:

As you were talking about going back 10 minutes ago, we were talking about words that kind of don’t make sense. I was thinking about the classic Detroit song, one from Midnight Train: “Just a city girl born and raised.” Then everyone goes, “South Detroit.” There is no South Detroit. “Scene in a smoking room, the smell of wine and cheap perfume.” I don’t know.

That’s what’s fun about certain kinds of language: they pull you in and they reel you in like you’re a fish on bait, but you kind of never really figure out what they mean. Why are you saying that? Why does that work? But something about kind of like an abstract painting, something about the way that the words are combined, the way that they’re together on the page. Huh. I like that. I want to keep exploring that. I want to memorize that.

Mitch Albom:

We have a good laugh at everybody who comes in and sings that song. In fact, they play it in the Red Wings games. “Just a small town boy born and raised in South Detroit.” Everybody screams, “South Detroit.”

Just so that people who are listening to your show know this: Detroit is the only city in America where Canada is south of us. So you take a bridge or a tunnel down south to go to Canada. So South Detroit would be Canada.

David Perell:

Oh, I didn’t know that.

Mitch Albom:

Yeah, and so there is no South Detroit, and we get a good laugh out of that. But as you say, it’s an iconic song, so everybody sings it.

David Perell:

You know what makes for good songwriting?

Mitch Albom:

I think, like you said, there has to be a stick-with-it-ness to it that almost always comes from something rhythmic first and foremost. Because it’s hard to remember a song or stay with a song that doesn’t have something you can tap your foot to. Even if it’s a slow tap, you want to tap your foot. Then it has to have a hook of some kind that just stays with you and won’t let you go. And then the lyrics have to be ones that come back to you or that you stay with.

Poetry and songwriting can make a song beautiful but not popular. It’s really hard to have deep, deep words that are difficult and still have it be popular. Bob Dylan did it in some songs. Everybody knows “Blowing in the Wind,” but they know “Blowing in the Wind” because you say over and over again, “The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind. The answer is blowing in the wind.” That’s very much a folk song.

When you take the words to “Hurricane,” the story about Reuben Carter, almost nobody can remember this. It just goes on and on and on forever. So everyone goes, “Yeah, it’s a brilliant song.”

“Well, tell me two lines from it.” “I can’t tell you. I don’t remember the two lines. It’s a brilliant song.”

There’s what makes a good song, the answer by a rock critic, and then there’s what makes a good song, the answer by a music fan. The answer by a music fan is generally going to be that they can sing it easily. They can remember it after the first time that they heard it. It’s catchy, and it somehow speaks to them. The answer by a rock critic could be any one of a number of other things, but that’s the difference between critics and fans, I guess.

David Perell:

Well, I know love is a theme in your book. Why’d you pursue that?

Mitch Albom:

Well, it’s the theme in the book.

David Perell:

It’s kind of the theme in life.

Mitch Albom:

It is. And I’ve written love stories within my stories before. Almost every one of my books really has had main characters who have had a love of their lives. But this is the first book that I’ve written that love is the theme of the book.

I mentioned to you before that I try to do themes first, and the theme of this was the idea that the grass is always greener or our regrets. But I really wanted to do it with love. I wanted to do it about the grass always being greener when it comes to love, or our thoughts about, “I could have done better in love,” or, “Maybe this wasn’t the perfect person for me.”

Because we do that, whether we want to admit that or not. We do. It’s lovely to say, “I’m with the love of my life and the perfect person for my life,” and I’m sure that’s true in cases where people are very earnest about it. But you can also be with the love of your life and have forged a great relationship, but also somewhere along the line have asked yourself, “What would have happened if I didn’t get with this person? What would happen if this person died? What would happen if this person decided they didn’t want to be with me anymore? What would happen if I just changed my mind? What would happen if someone else came along?”

We do these things; we watch other people’s relationships, and we think, “Is that one better than what I have? Are they more in love than I am? Are they getting more love than I’m getting?” It just occurs to me that one of the biggest second guessings in our lives is our love life, and probably our career life. “I could have done this. I should have done that. I should have been a baseball player.”

I wanted to really explore the idea of love, and I think I’ve reached an age where I can do it now with some perspective. I think if I had tried to write this book when I was in my 30s or 40s, I wouldn’t have gone through enough of life to understand the difference between passion and love, or between crushes and love.

David Perell:

Lust and love.

Mitch Albom:

Yeah, lust and love. And so everybody wants to talk about the combustible part of love, like the flame. If you think of love as a flame, everybody wants to talk about how it gets lit. Everybody loves the combustible part of life. Everyone loves the meet cute and how love gets started, right?

David Perell:

How’d you meet?

Mitch Albom:

Yeah, how’d you meet? When was your first kiss? When did you first sleep with each other?

David Perell:

When did you know they were the one?

Mitch Albom:

Nobody talks about the down-the-road part of love. And nobody talks about how you take that flame and blow on the embers of it and get it to go. That’s so much more the story of love than the combustibility of it, because a flame by itself can go out, can be extinguished if you pour water on it or you go like that to it. It can blow up and burn your house down. It all depends on what you do with that flame.

So the nurturing of that flame after the combustibility—what it takes to keep it going and let it be a warm fire that will take care of you for the rest of your life—that’s something that we don’t explore a lot. I’ve had that with my wife, and I’ve been very blessed to have a wonderful wife. It’s not like every day is sugar and roses and we never have a disagreement or anything like that. But I have been blessed to know what true love is. I’ve never doubted my wife’s love for me.

I’ve realized, as the years have passed, that that is not something that everybody gets to experience. People are suspicious of their wives, doubtful of their wives, and they wonder. I’ve had people say to me, “I’m not sure my wife likes me.” And I’m like, “God, what a thing to have to think about.” So I really wanted to explore the questions we ask ourselves about love.

Alfie and Gianna are the two protagonists of this story. They meet when they’re children in Africa, and they have a little eight-year-old puppy love thing. Then they don’t see each other again until college, when they accidentally are brought back together. Alfie is just smitten by her, but she’s just too cool for him. He goes after her like a puppy dog and finally professes his love for her. You find out that she was kind of waiting for him all along.

They come together great, and you’re kind of rooting for them. They have this early great existence in New York City, like I did when I first moved here. They don’t have any money, but they’re happy and all those kinds of things.

Then time passes, and things take their toll. Of course, he has the magic power to go and do things over again, which he’s never told her. So he has this secret, and at one point, he tries to tell her. He says, “I can do that. I can go back and change things.” She goes, “Oh, really? Well, that’s interesting to know.” He goes, “What would you do if you could go back and change anything?” He wants to engage her, and she thinks for a second and says nothing. He says, “What do you mean, nothing?” She says, “I don’t know how this tapestry is going to play out. Everything must be happening for some reason, and I don’t want to change it because that would change who I am.”

It’s such a perfect little answer that it makes him almost ashamed that he brought it up, and he never brings it up again. But sure enough, as the years pass, something happens, and he starts to get a wandering eye, and he’s tempted. Then a fight occurs, and in a climactic, angry, drunken moment, he decides he’s going to try something else.

That’s when he realizes and finds out that this power that he has doesn’t work with love. So once you turn your back on a true love in this world that he is with his magic, that person can never love you again. He discovers this world where this woman who he always loved is in it, but the feeling is gone.

What happens after that? That is that taking-care-of-the-flame thing that I’m talking about. If you let it get to a point where it extinguishes, it doesn’t come back.

So the book becomes this treatise about when you have love and you don’t appreciate it, when you don’t have it and you want it back, and all those things that go on with love. What does he do, because the book becomes this whole thing about what does he do now that he’s time-traveled out of the best relationship of his life?

It was a really interesting thing, and I got to read it to my wife. She has never actually read a book of mine the way that you or I would read a book, because I read them to her towards the end of the writing. It’s one of the last things I do before I turn it in. I say, “Are you ready to hear it?” She says, “Okay,” and we have to find big chunks of time. We go down to my office usually, and I sit in the chair, and she sits around the corner so that I don’t see her face.

David Perell:

Oh, wow.

Mitch Albom:

Because I don’t want to look over and see her go, “Yeah.” What? Nothing.

No, you made a face. “What?”

“No, I didn’t make a face. I had something in my eye.”

You know, I can’t see her when I read, and it’s a very instructive time because when you’re reading a book out loud for the first time, you’re hearing it in a different way also. Once in a while, she’ll go, “Mmm.”

I’ll say, “Is that a good mmm or a good mmm?”

“Yeah, no, it was good, it was good.”

I read this one to her, and when I finally got to the end, the last page, and I will say that the end of this book is very jarring, and everything comes together on the last two pages. So please, if you’re listening to this, don’t go to the last two pages of the book to just see it. You’ll ruin it. You’ll destroy it. You’ve got to leave it alone and wait and see what happens.

When I read that to her, and then I looked up when I said the last line, she leaned forward, she gave me a big kiss and hug. That meant a lot to me because I wrote it for her, and I dedicated the book for her. I haven’t always appreciated the love that she has constantly provided for me, no matter what.

I don’t think guys sometimes realize the comfort that we have in knowing that our wives love us through thick and thin. We pay more attention to little blurbs, blips that happen along the way, that this got upset over this or disagreed over that. But that layer of just true love, the bed that you get to lie in every night, it’s easy to take that for granted, and when it’s gone, it’s really gone, and that’s really hard to replace. So, it’s what I wanted to say about love. I haven’t been mature enough to do it until probably now, if I am. So, yeah, that’s something different for me.

David Perell:

But you made me think of two stories. One is a very sweet one. Another one’s a little more difficult. When I was in Texas, I’d always go to Chick-fil-A on Saturdays with a mentor of mine. Every Saturday at 11:30, there was an old couple that would come in, and the wife could barely.

Mitch Albom:

I thought they weren’t open on Sundays.

David Perell:

Oh, sorry, on Saturday.

Mitch Albom:

Yeah. Somebody’s gonna point out it couldn’t have been a Sunday. Totally.

David Perell

We would have gotten... You know what? Cunningham’s law. I think it is Cunningham’s law. The best way to get an answer on the Internet is to be wrong about something, and then everyone, you get all the keyboard warriors. Okay, so Saturday. Saturday, we always do it.

At 11:30, they walk in. It’s this old guy who can barely walk with this frail woman. They always sit down in the same booth, and he goes and he gets her a vanilla ice cream, and he gives it to her. It’s just like clockwork. Me and Brian, we always go together. We’re like, man, I can’t wait to see them. So that’s a sweet one.

It’s old people’s love. When we think of love, even in relationships, it’s like, “Hey, let’s go watch The Notebook.” It’s never culturally, it’s never the old people’s love.

Mitch Albom:

Right.

David Perell:

That’s not what we focus on. It’s always Ryan Gosling falling in love.

Mitch Albom:

The rain. I love you so much.

David Perell:

Right. The kiss with the dramatic music and the spinning camera angle.

Last week, I played golf with a guy who’s probably 62, 63, and we probably spent an hour talking about how he’s just gotten divorced and what it was like to find out that his wife had had an affair and was cheating on him with the football coach of their kids’ high school. It was so painful. Talk about when love leaves and you lose it. I mean, I think they got divorced 10 to 12 years ago, and you could just feel in every single word the despair, the sense of loss, the agony that still keeps him up at night. To watch those two little moments play out, there’s a real gravity.

Mitch Albom:

Yeah. It’s interesting that you say that because I’ve been asked many times about loss and because I guess Tuesdays with Morrie obviously deals with that theme so many times. So many of the other things that I’ve written are about loss or dying. I wrote a book about our little girl who died from a brain tumor. A lot of books that I’ve written have been about loss, but they’ve been about loss of life. This is the first one that I’ve really written, which is about loss of love.

You’re right. Loss of life is a pain that you carry with you that you can do nothing about, and you’re in two different worlds. The person that you yearn for and miss is someplace, and what is hurting you is that they’re not there anymore physically. You can’t go see them; you can’t go talk to them. A loss of love—the person can still be in the world; can still be right there.

That’s what happens with Alfie. This Gianna, she’s still there, and she still knows him, and they were friends. They have the history, but she just doesn’t feel the same way.

She doesn’t remember a time that she ever did because he went back in time and undid everything. So, he’s looking at this woman who he felt so strongly about, and she once felt so strongly about him, and now it’s gone. She’s still here, and she’s right in front of him. He’s not going to a tombstone. He’s not going to a cemetery. He’s not looking at the sky saying, “I wish you were here.” She is there. What he’s saying is, “I wish you felt about me the way that you used to feel about me,” and that’s a whole different sense of loss. It was a chance for me to explore that.

Barry Manilow sang the song, but it was a David Pomerantz song. He was a beautiful songwriter called “Trying to Get the Feeling Again.” “I’ve been up, down, everywhere I possibly can. Like a bloodhound trying to get the feeling again.” He’s trying to find this emotion that he once felt for someone, but it’s gone. That’s a yearning that everybody can relate to, so I’m hoping that people who read Twice will find that too.

It occurs to me as you’re talking, I’ve written about loss again, but it’s not somebody dying; it’s a flame going out.

David Perell:

You are welcome on this show anytime.

Mitch Albom:

You’ve got to give me ten more years to come up with new stories because I think I told you every one I have.

David Perell:

Next time, we’re doing three hours.

Mitch Albom:

Three hours. All right. I appreciate it. Thank you for the good question.