Fresh Air - Mitch Albom Is A 'Walking Example Of A Second Chance'

Episode Date: October 13, 2025

Albom's new novel, Twice, asks a question most of us have daydreamed about: what if you could go back and relive any moment of your life? In the book, a man is born with that exact power, but every second chance comes with a cost. Albom talks with Tonya Mosley about his new book, and the lasting influence of Morrie Schwartz, his old college professor who died in 1995 of ALS. Nearly 30 years ago, Albom chronicled their weekly visits in his bestselling book Tuesdays With Morrie. Since then, he has written several more bestsellers, exploring love, loss, and what it means to live fully in the face of mortality.Follow Fresh Air on instagram @nprfreshair, and subscribe to our weekly newsletter for gems from the Fresh Air archive, staff recommendations, and a peek behind the scenes. Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

In the U.S., national security news can feel far away from daily life. Distant wars, murky conflicts, diplomacy behind closed doors on our new show, Sources and Methods. NPR reporters on the ground bring you stories of real people, helping you understand why distant events matter here at home. Listen to sources and methods on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. This is Fresh Air. I'm Tanya Mosley, and my guest today is Mitch Album. It was 30 years ago that he wrote Tuesdays with Mori, a tender, true story about the lessons he learned from his old college professor, Mori Schwartz, who died of ALS. The book became one of the best-selling memoirs of all time, with its simple but profound reflections on living. And that experience set album on a path he's walked ever since, writing stories about love and loss and the search for meaning in the face of mortality.

His latest novel, twice, starts with a question most of us have probably daydreamed about. What if you had the power to redo any moment of your life? In the book, a man named Alfie is born with the ability to go back and relive any moment he chooses. But with every second chance comes a cost. He can't change matters of the heart, and he can't stop someone from dying when it's their time. Since Tuesdays with Mori, album has written eight bestsellers, including The the five people you meet in heaven, and the stranger in the lifeboat, many of which have been adapted for stage and screen. He's also been a sports columnist for the Detroit Free Press for over

40 years. But those visits with Mori didn't just shape the writer album became. They also changed how he moved through the world. Mori once told him that giving makes you feel more alive than taking. A lesson album took to heart. He runs nine charities in Detroit that supports veterans, students, and people in need of housing and medical care. And for the past 15 years, he's also operated an orphanage in Haiti. Mitch Album, welcome to fresh air. Thank you for having me. Okay, so Mitch, in this book, Alfie has this incredible ability. He can go back and relive any moment of his life. And he uses it in the way that we all would expect to use it if we had this power, especially when he was a kid. He used it to stop bullies to impress girls.

But as he gets older, this power becomes more complicated. What drew you to write about the darker side of this kind of fantasy? Probably just getting older. I think, you know, when you're younger, if you want to try something different, you do. You want to switch your career. You do it. You want to switch who you're dating. You do it. You want to move to another country. you do it, but I noticed as people get older, the concrete settles a little bit more, and it's harder to just switch out. And so those would-be switches start to turn into regrets. And then they start to turn into that question in your head, if only I had taken that job, if only I had moved to that country, if only I had picked that different person to marry. And so I realized that

this is probably a pretty universal theme. And I wanted to explore, well, what would happen if you actually had the ability to do that. And not to time travel 15 different times and do it over again. That seemed kind of pointless. But you get one more crack at it. Would that second crack really be better or would it just bring with it a whole new set of circumstances? And as Alfie gets older, that's what he starts to discover. And then he also learns of one particular caveat with the power that's that he didn't know about. And that is that it doesn't work with love. And if you turn your back on a true love to try to go find somebody else, that person can

never love you again. And you can, they'll be in the world, you can know them, but they'll never feel the same way about you. And so this power comes with that consequence as well. And of course, as you can imagine, since I'm a writer, he has to make a very faithful decision at one point in the book, and I'll sort of leave it there. So the rules are clear. You can't make someone love you twice. There's also a second rule here. You also can't change when a person will die. So basically, love and mortality are the

two unchangeable forces. What made you choose those particular limits? Well, mortality, that was easy because you can't change mortality. And in fact, he discovers this at the beginning of the book when he first discovers his power because he's eight years old. He doesn't know he has this power. He's in Africa with his parents who are missionaries. His mother gets sick. She's in bed. And he goes out to play instead of sitting with her. His father wants him to sit with her, but his father leaves. And he says, well, she's sleeping. You know, why do I have my guy? I'm eight years old. I just go out and play. So he goes out and plays. And while he's out playing, she dies. And when he comes back in, He realizes he missed her death and he was playing. And he's so upset and he's so angry with himself. And he's so, you know, and through the course of the night, he sort of like engenders this power. He brings it upon him. And he wakes up the next morning and it's the day before.

And his mother is still alive in bed and he goes, this time he goes and he sits with her. And she opens her eyes and she sees him and they have a last discussion together. And she tells him all the things that he loves, that she loves about him. She says, sit here, let me, because she realizes he has this power. She says, sit here. Before I die, let me tell you all the things I love about you. But he still can't change the fact that she dies. And he ultimately ends up saying, you know, he was playing Superman when she died.

And he writes a sentence, my mother died while I was trying to fly. And Tanya, I actually wrote that because my mother died while I was on an airplane. I had just gone to visit her in California. She had had a stroke and couldn't talk, and I missed having a last conversation with her because no one knew, of course, the stroke was coming, and then all of a sudden she couldn't talk anymore. And so for months, we just were sitting with each other and looking at each other and that type of thing. And I had gotten on a plane to fly somewhere. And when I landed, my brother called me and said,

Mom died while you were flying. And so that seemed to me was very poignant. And for all my wishing, I knew I couldn't make her come back. So the whole idea of being able to change mortality was kind of inside me already. And I wanted my character to have that limit too. The second part of your question, why love? That's deliberate because I believe that and the point that I wanted to make with twice was that love is different than it's not the last shot of a basketball game. You don't go back and just change the play, get the ball a little differently, throw it in, the ball goes in instead of missing, you win the game, done. Love starts with the ignition, but you you have to keep it going. And it is, to me, the 100th day of being in love and the 1,000th day of being in love and the 10,000th day of being in love are all part of love.

And if you want to, you could no more go back and start all over again and get that same thing back, then you could take river, take water that had run downstream from a river and say, let's put it back upstream. It's happened already. So I made the rules like, uh-uh, if you decide this person's in love with me and we've been doing, we've been in love for years. But you know what? I kind of like that one over there. All right, make that decision, but you don't get to take that love with you when you make that decision. That's gone. And I thought, I hope, and I do hope that people will read it and make them maybe think about that whole grass being greener with somebody else idea. Because, you know, It's not just the first blade of grass. It's the whole lawn, you know, that you have to do all over again. You know, Mitch, there's also the lesson that really when you get to do things over and over and over, you don't really learn much. Yeah.

Yeah. And that's, that, Tanya, is kind of the takeaway from it for me. You know, a number of people since the book has come out have asked me, so is there anything in your life that you would do over again? And I think some people expect that I would say, I don't know, they think Tuesdays with Mori has turned me into a Zen master or something. And I would say, no, no, all is what the universe is supposed to be. No, of course I would do things over in my life. I can rattle off 30 things right now. But if you said to me in doing them over, you have to surrender whatever you've learned and whatever you've done.

as a result of what you've learned from your mistakes, then I wouldn't trade it because all of those things that I would redo, the consequences of those things made me into who I am now. You know, it's like taking out a piece of the tapestry. It falls apart. So I wouldn't go back and undo things if I had a sacrifice what I had learned from doing them. And, yeah, yeah, his grandmother, at one point, says to him,

He says, how can we only get to go back twice? You know, why don't we get to go back again and again? She says, Alfie, if you kept getting second chances, you wouldn't learn a damn thing. And, you know, really, even if you get one, sometimes, you don't learn anything. This idea that as we get older, we become more set in our ways. We don't take chances. We don't try things. We don't try new things.

We don't do things over. Was there a particular seed for you? What were you wrestling with? when you kind of came up with this idea? Well, I wasn't wrestling with it as much as being a byproduct of it, to be honest with you, Tanya, because I am kind of a walking example of a second chance. Many things in my life I did in the first part of my life that would have set the pattern for maybe a whole different second half, and then things happened, and I ended up getting

different opportunities. And I watched how you can sort of bifurcate your life if certain things happen. And I thought, well, I've got experience in sort of a second act. Maybe I can work it into a book. I mean, one of those second acts we know very well, you were sports writer for a very long time or just for the first half of your career. And then you had this fateful interaction with an old college professor, Mori, who was dying of ALS. Was that kind of a second chance as well? 100%. Yeah, that probably is the, if my life were a graph, that would be the, you know, the point where you put the pencil in and you start drawing the line the other direction because it was a huge pivot for me. I didn't realize it at the time, but I had been extremely ambitious. I

extremely kind of singularly focused on becoming, you know, the best sports writer that there could be the most well-known. I was on ESPN. I did a column that was nationally syndicated across the country. I did radio. I was going 100 miles an hour and 100 hours a week. And I happened to see my old college professor, Mori Schwartz, on Nightline. I just was flipping the channels, and he was talking to Ted Koppel about what it was like to die from Lou Gehrig's disease. And that was the first I found out that he had this disease. And he and I had been extremely in college. I mean, I had taken every class he offered. I majored in sociology because of him. I wrote my honors thesis with him, and I had always promised that I would stay in touch.

And then as I became this ambitious animal, I broke that promise for 16 years. And all of a sudden, here he is on television telling an interviewer that he's about to die. And so I called him up, thinking that I would just ease my conscience with a phone call. And he kind of guilted me into coming to visit him once. So I thought, well, I'll just go once and ease my conscience that way. And when I saw him in person, it was so moving to see, you know, how he had been stripped of so many things by the disease. He couldn't walk anymore. He could barely lift a piece of tomato up to his mouth. He took him a minute and a half to chew a single piece of tomato. He's

having trouble breathing. But he was seemed so content with how he had lived his life and so interested in exploring, dying. And he had this amazing attitude about life. When I went home that night, I said, you're 37 years old and perfectly healthy. And he's 78 years old and dying. And he's 10 times happier with his life than you are. And something's wrong with that picture. And so I started to go back. And I did not realize it at the time. But that was the pivot moment in my life for everything that has come since. Yeah. I mean, it's so amazing. Because really, I mean, when you look at the totality of almost every book that you've written after Tuesdays with Mori, they all tie back in a very direct way to a lot of the lessons that are written in that book. You know, it also, you wrote that book at a time when baby boomers in particular were starting to face their parents' mortality.

You kind of gave, you gave people a script on how to have those kinds of conversations with their, with their parents or their loved ones who were nearing death. And I was curious, when did you begin to realize how profound of an impact the book was having? I probably realized it most poignantly in airports because I, as I mentioned, I've been on ESPN regularly for years prior to that. So my face was recognizable to a lot of people, particularly sports fans. and I used to get stopped in airports and people would say, hey, sports guy, you know, sometimes that's all they would call me sports guy, you know, or sometimes they say, Mitch, who's going to win the Super Bowl? And I would just say, you know, the New England Patriots and get on the escalator and keep going because, first of all, the answer was always the Patriots back then, so that was easy. And secondly, that's all they wanted from me. And then I began to notice that people would come up to me with a different sort of tone. They would say, um, You're Mitch Album, right? And I'd say, yeah. My mother died of cancer. And the last thing we did was read Tuesdays with Mori together. Can I talk to you about her? And you can't say New England Patriots and get on the escalator. You have to stop and you have to listen. And I began to become a listener. You know, I want to ask you about that time period when you were really being celebrated for Tuesdays with Mori.

you won this very prestigious honor, the Red Smith Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2010. And when that happened, there was some criticism that rose up during that time. Some called your work, Feel Good Fairy Tales Fluff, and others said it was verging on being emotionally manipulative. And I wondered, do you ever struggle when you write about real grief and real death? this line between moving people and manipulating them? Is that something that you've ever really sat with? And I ask this because it's something that I also struggle with when telling stories about people suffering. Well, I think it's kind of cynical to look at something that moves people and say, oh, you're just manipulating them. I don't know what drives a person to

think of criticism like that. I don't think I've ever looked at anything that's moved me and felt that the author, the director, the songwriter was out there to just try to trick me. I've never done that in my life. I wouldn't know how. And in fact, what's funny is Tuesdays with Mori, I had one goal in writing Tuesdays with Mori from a writing perspective, and that was, don't overdo it. You know, I had read, I was a sports writer. I'd never written anything like that before. and I read a bunch of books about death and, you know, different accounts of death. And they were beautiful. You know, some of them were so poetic in the words that they used.

And I said to myself, you can't do that. You don't have that skill set at your age and your experience with sports. Keep it simple. Just strip it down. In fact, when I turned the book in, it was supposed to be 300 pages. and I didn't really keep a very good count of it, and they called me up a week or two later, and they said, we have a problem. I said, what? They said, well, we laid this out, we paginated this, and this is only going to be like 175 pages. And I said, well, that's all I got. That's it.

So if anything, I was going out of my way not to be manipulative or anything like that, or overwrite or over-sentimental. So I hadn't really heard that a lot, but now that that you're telling it to me, I don't, I certainly don't do that. And I think when you write about people's grief and you write about love and you write about human emotions, you are doing what artists have done since, you know, time of memorial. I mean, you write about feelings and you, and if what I write makes people cry or leaves them teary or choked up, okay, but it's not, it's not, I don't sit there going, oh, this will make them cry. Believe me, I don't have that power.

Let's take a short break. If you're just joining us, my guest is writer Mitch Album. We're talking about his new novel twice and his remarkable career writing about the questions that define us, how to live well, love fully, and face the choices and second chances that shape our lives. We'll be right back after a short break. I'm Tanya Mosley, and this is Fresh Air.

Hi, this is Molly C.V. Nesper, digital producer, at Fresh Air. And this is Terry Gross, host of the show. One of the things I do is write the weekly newsletter. And I'm a newsletter fan. I read it every Saturday after breakfast. The newsletter includes all the week's shows, staff recommendations, and Molly picks timely highlights from the archive. It's a fun read. It's also the only place where we tell you what's coming up next week, an exclusive. So subscribe at www.org slash fresh air and look for an email from Molly every Saturday morning. So much of your sports writing was very narrative-based. So yes, you were writing about the winning of games and play-by-play, but you also were writing these really deep, well-thought-out

columns and pieces in a Sunday paper. Yeah, well, I always felt that, first of all, sports, I never got into sports because I was that interested in sports. I got into sports because that's where the job was when I got started, and because I thought that it was a great tapestry to talk about human emotion. You know, there's always a winner, a loser, there's the agony of trying, and then you come up short because you get injured. There's so much emotion involved in it, but I'll give you a perfect example, Tanya, of something that I wrote that appealed to me and is the kind of emotion that I think good writing contains. It's probably the biggest reaction I ever had to a sports column I wrote, and I write in Detroit, I write for the Detroit

Free Press. It was not about a Detroit team or a Detroit athlete or a Detroit sports story. It was about a person who no one in my market had ever heard of before. I was at the Olympics. I think it was 1992 in Barcelona. I had gone there early to the stadium to prepare for Carl Lewis, the famous Olympian, was running in the 100 meters that night. And I knew that it would be hard to get a seat. So I had gone there really early to get a good seat where I could see the race, and I figured I'd just spend the afternoon there. While I was there waiting, the place was half empty, and they were running these heats for the 400 meters, which is one lap around the track. And the gun went off, a bunch of runners I'd never heard of, start running around a track. One

of them pulls up lane, which happens all the time. He pulled a hamstring or something. And he's in the lane and everyone else is running past him and i say to myself oh too bad that guy's out of it and all of a sudden a man runs out of the stands and comes onto the field gets onto the track and picks this guy up and starts walking him around the track well by the time they get around the curve everyone is you know come on you know like this cheering cheering and the man puts the young it's an older man, and he puts the younger man, the runner, on his feet. So his heels are on his feet, and he's sort of walking him that way. And they get to the finish line. Of course, it's this big applause. He finishes, you know, like a minute and a half after everybody else did.

So I go racing downstairs, and we find the man who came out of the stands. And I run up to him and I say, who are you? And he says, I'm his father. And I said, well, why did you do what you did? He said, well, I couldn't bear to see him, you know, hurt. And I just, you know, just felt, I know I'm not supposed to be out there, but I just ran out there. And I knew that if he didn't cross the finish line, he wouldn't get recorded in the books as having actually participated in the Olympics. So it was so important for him to cross the finish line. And I said, well, why did you just urge him or hold him? He said, well, I taught him how to run. When he was a little boy, I'm getting joked up telling this story. When he was a little boy, I put his feet on my feet,

and I taught him how to run. And that's what I did again. And I went back to my chair and I called my editor and I said, I'm not writing about Carl Lewis. I have a better story. They said, what are you talking about? You know, is Carl Lewis. You know, you got to write. I said, trust me, this is a better story. And I wrote about this guy, Derek Redmond and his father who picked him up and put him on his feet and walked around the track.

Now, I'm getting choked up just telling you that story. And I've told that story a batch of times over the course of my life. but as someone who is very much about children and children who are heard or weak and taking care of them, that gets to me. And I don't know how to write that story without emotion. So if that's manipulative, then I guess I'm manipulative, but I just wrote it the way that it happened. And to this day, I hear people tell me about, oh, I remember that story about that guy. They don't remember his name. They don't remember the Olympics.

But they remember that a father found his son and helped him. in is time of need. And that's what I look for in my books. That's what I look for in any column. That's what I look for in any movie or any screenplay or anything that I write, is how can everybody relate to what I'm writing? I remember that story, too. You know, it makes me think about you being a sports reporter in Detroit at a very specific time period. I mean, the peak of your sports writing career happened. The Pistons, I mean, they were just the sports team back in the late 80s and the 90s. The Tigers won in 84. But this was also when Detroit was being devastated by the crack epidemic. The city kind of felt lawless in ways that went beyond what most Americans

understood. And so sports was kind of this unifying force. Maybe the one thing the whole city could gather around. That's what I remember as a young person in Detroit, reading your columns and just being a part of all of it. And I just always wonder, were you writing about joy and about victories in the middle of all of that suffering with an awareness of the contrast as you were living it? Well, I didn't write to try to contrast it. I wrote kind of like surfing on the wave of the city. And I could feel, because I lived there, how we felt, and in Detroit, we don't mind calling ourselves we, you know, how we sort of felt about our teams and how we felt when they were successful, how we felt, for example, when the Red Wings won the Stanley Cup and the next

two days later, they had a big parade and two of their players and one of their staff members were involved in this terrible car crash when the limo driver was drunk and they were never the same again. You know, one became a paraplegic and how we felt about that, you know, and the shock. So I would try to reflect the emotions of the city, but I also would dive into a lot of those moments that you're talking about and those neighborhoods that you're talking about. And often, Tanya, and if you were there, perhaps you remember, I would write a series every winter called Dreams Deferred, and they would be about athletes. who were cut short or had their dreams cut short because of something that happened in our city

or, you know, be it a drunk driving incident, a bullet, a shooting, a crash, something like that. I remember one about this young man who was a very promising high school basketball player and all of a sudden he stopped coming to practice at the height of his, you know, success. He just stopped coming and then he stopped coming to school. And the coach went out to, you know, find out why. And he found out that his mother was a crack addict and that when he would go leave the house, the dealers would come to the house and sell her drugs and she'd get high again and couldn't get out of it. So he quit school and quit the basketball team to stand on the porch. And he was only like 15.

And he stood on the porch and whenever they would come around, he'd say, get out of here, you know. And they'd say, well, where's your mother? She doesn't want anything to do with you. He became like a sentinel on his own porch. So I wrote that story. I went and interviewed him. I interviewed his mother. And I would do umpteen stories like that because I felt that I needed to reflect the city that I worked in.

And that was the truth of the city that I worked in, too. Not just the, you know, the Pistin Success or the parades or the Red Wings, you know, winning Stanley Cups, but the flip side of it. Let's take a short break. If you're just joining us, my guest is writer Mitch Album. We're talking about his new novel twice and his remarkable career. writing about the questions that define us, how to live well, love fully, and face the choices and second chances that shape our lives. We'll be right back after a break. This is fresh air. You know, you spoke earlier about your soft spot for children, for young people. There's this work

you're doing in Haiti. You have been operating an orphanage there for like 15 years. How did Haiti, of all places, become part of your life? Well, as you know, there was a terrible earthquake in January of 2010 in Haiti. A pastor came to me and said he'd had an orphanage there, but it had been destroyed, and he couldn't get down there, and he thought that all the kids were dead. Could I help him get down there? And he came to me because I have a radio program in Detroit. And I used some connections I had, and we were able to get a small plane trip

into Haiti just a couple weeks after the earthquake when no commercial flights were going and nobody was getting down there and you couldn't get cell service or anything. And we went in and what I saw there was the worst devastation that I've, I hope to ever see in my life. People were just, there were people dead in the street. There were people doing triage doctors in the street. People climbing on piles of rubble, pulling out rocks and looking for loved ones, you know, people without water, electricity, any food. And we went to this orphanage and it hadn't been destroyed, but it had been overrun by people jumping the walls

thinking that they were going to bring food there. So there were hundreds of people mixed in with the kids. But I was so taken with the children. They were so joyous and they prayed every night and they were thankful even though they didn't own a thing, you know, and their toilets were holes in the ground. There was no kitchen. They just would eat a couple things of rice a day. So when I went back, I started writing stories about it. And I gathered up a group of guys in Detroit, you know,

a lot of people in Detroit work with their hands. We're good at that. And I got plumbers and roofers and contractors and electricians. And we started going down there. And we ended up making nine separate trips. And we built the first toilets that they had ever had, built the first showers, the first kitchen, the first school eventually. But I noticed that the kids were still starving. Every time we came down there, they were still just basically eating cups of rice and not very much. And I said to the pastor, what's going on?

And that's when he said, well, I don't have any money to run this place. And I'm 80-something years old. And I kind of blurted out, well, I could probably operate this place. I mean, but I don't. I don't want to understate this because, I mean, like, this is, this is like a, it's a core part of your life and what you do in the same way that you were going every Tuesday to see Mori. You go to Haiti on a regular basis. You're flying back and forth all the time. There's a lot that's happening in Haiti right now. There's a lot of gang violence that's happening. Just this past summer, the Trump administration terminated this temporary protected status for Haiti. Is this right that you have like 24 security guards to protect the orphanage from gangs at any given time. Yes, that's all correct. I've been going there for, yeah, coming on 16 years in January, and we've had, you know, over 100 kids come through. Many of them are up here now in college.

I think we have about 16 in college, and one in medical school in his third year, one going to medical school. But life in Haiti at the orphanage is brutal. And I can't even fly into Porter Prince anymore. I have to fly into Cap Haitian, which is a little town up north, about 100 and some miles from Porter Prince, and then take a helicopter just to try to land on a hill. And how often are you doing that? I try to go every month. Yeah. I mean, the gang violence sometimes makes it impossible, but otherwise I go every month. And, you know, these are, I look at these kids as my family, you know, and we have a great staff there, but we have to take armored cars if we go anywhere. Our kids haven't been outside of the orphanage in over four years. They have not set foot

outside. Imagine that. It's not safe. You can get kidnapped. You can get shot. We have bullet casings that land on our grounds all the time. The other day, I got to call a picture of one of our supposedly bulletproof cars, and the back window was smashed, and there was a bullet. Somebody shot from somewhere they're not necessarily shooting at us but it comes over the wall and goes through the back glass of your car and if somebody had been in there

they would have been shot you know electricity maybe you get it a couple hours a day there are days you don't get it at all diesel fuel is ridiculously expensive water is difficult to find and I constantly try to trumpet

you know this country is just off our coast It's an hour and a half from Miami, you know, and we were in Haiti in the, you know, 20th century. We occupy or controlled its government, you know, basically for 15 years that we, their money was in our banks. We helped write their constitution. We have a history with Haiti, and we shouldn't ignore it. And unfortunately, not only us, but it feels like the rest of the world kind of, ah, that's just Haiti. Haiti's always trouble. But there's so much heartbreak and so much poverty.

And yet the kids are brilliant. That has to be frustrating. I mean, I'm using the term frustrating. But, I mean, it's got to be something even bigger, a bigger feeling or sentiment that you feel. At this point, you know, Maury said to you, you need to do more than write a check. And, I mean, it's pretty obvious with all the things that you do

that you're doing much more than writing a check. But then you're also up against the limits of what one person can do, even with the support of others who have been there to help you financially and also go down there with you. Well, that's why you try to enlist others to support you. And that's why I write about it. And that's why I wrote Finding Chica, you know, which was a story about a little girl who we adopted from Haiti who had a brain tumor. And in it, I tell the whole story of the orphanage because you're right. I can't do it by myself and nobody can do it by myself. And I don't kid myself and I'm going to be able to save Haiti in any way.

If you can save one little piece of it and someone else comes down and saves another little piece of it. And these are children. I mean, we have children who have been abandoned, left under trees to die. You know, a woman picked up a child who was left in the woods crying and she bought him to the police. And she said, I found this child who was abandoned. And the police said, well, what did you pick him up for? Now we have to do paperwork. Why don't you just leave him there?

That's what we're up against there. We have children who were left at malnutrition clinics and nobody comes back for them. They come to us, you know, skeletons. We have a little girl that's now in my life who was brought to us six months. She weighed six pounds. She had nothing to eat but sugar water, nothing solid to eat for the first six months of her life. And we had to bring her to America and put her on this nutrition, around the clock nutrition program, maybe two hours feeding her this stuff, you know, just to try to get her to live.

Nadia is her name. Noddy, Nottie, yeah. Noddy, yeah. She's the joy of our lives now. She's three years old. Three and a half, you know, adopted her, three and a half. Well, we're in the process of it, yes. We're her legal guardians here.

Let's take a short break. If you're just joining us, my guest is writer Mitch album. We're talking about his new novel twice, his remarkable career, writing about the questions that define us, how to live well. love fully, and face the choices and second chances that shape our lives. We'll be right back after a short break. This is Fresh Air. You wrote Finding Chica in 2019. As you mentioned, you brought her to Michigan for treatment.

She died from a brain tumor at seven years old. And that book, I mean, you're right. You write in great detail about what's happening there in Haiti. But it's about loving a child you knew you were going to lose. And so now you have Nottie, this three-and-a-half-year-old girl. What makes you open your heart like that again? Oh, you just look at these children and your heart is open. I don't know how anybody can see the look in these kids' eyes and see what they've endured.

I don't know how anybody can hold a baby who weighs six pounds and can't open her eyes and not say, I have to help this child or something. see a little girl who has a brain tumor and bring her to hospital and they say she's going to be dead in four months. Just take her back to Haiti and let her die and not say to yourself, no, I can't do that. I think we're put in this earth to help children and to guide them. It's the greatest honor of my life to be in Haiti and to have any kind of effect on these kids. And, you know, it's a gift to be able to take care of children. And when we lost Chica, I have to admit, I was very angry at God and the world, I thought, how can you take a seven-year-old? You know, what did she do? And selfishly, you know, my wife and I didn't have children of our own.

And then we got involved with this orphanage and, of course, we got all these dozens of them around. But then all of a sudden we had this one who was in our lives and she was sleeping in our bedroom and she lived for two years and we traveled around the world trying to find a cure and became a family. and she died in our arms in our bed. You know, we held her as her final heartbeat disappeared. I remember that, I remember that, you know, like it just happened. And we got these two amazing years in our 50s to be parents of this beautiful, funny, loud, kind of obnoxious kid who was just so charming. And we got to be, you know, her mom.

and dad for that period of time, that's a gift. And when I tried to look at the world that way, and I try to look at our kids now that way, and I certainly look at Nottie that way, then why would you not accept that gift? As many times as it comes into your life, if it's one, if it's two, it's a dozen, if it's 50 or 60 like we have there now,

it's a gift to take care of children. You know, I was thinking about how Mori was, he was 78 when he gave you all those gifts of, wisdom, these lessons that change the trajectory of your life that has you doing the work that you're doing now and the stories that you're telling. You're 67, is that right? You're approaching your 70s, you're approaching that age that he was. How are you thinking about your own mortality? Well, yeah, I say that a lot when sometimes people come up to me and they go, Maury, can I ask you? I go, I'm not Maury. I was a stupid one. Remember?

He was the smart one. But then I realized I'm a lot closer to Mori's age now than my age when that all happened. And I am trying to leave a legacy of the people that I touch because I saw that Mori did. And I see what's important to me now is who do I influence or is there something that I've learned along the way that I can pass on? If I can somehow influence people positively, get them to think, the best compliment anybody ever gives me when they read my books is not, oh, wow, what a wordsmith you are or anything like that. It's, I can't stop thinking about what you wrote or your book really made me think or made me examine my life. Then I've created a little ripple in the pond, and I'd be very content with that. Mitch, I never been able to really tell you just how influential you've been to my life and career

and how much of it, just a real honor it is to be sitting here talking to you. Well, that's very kind of you. I remember, if I remember right, didn't you tell me once you wrote me a letter when you were younger, when you lived in Detroit? Yeah, I mean, it was more than that. Like, I think I've, first discovered you at 11. I would sit with my grandfather and he'd read the paper and he was really into all the sports and I would read the sports section and I fell in love with your writing. And I had a brother typewriter and I would rewrite your columns to learn how to write. And I would write you and you'd write me back these nice typed letters with your signature, which I kept. And I was an apprentice

at the Free Press in 1993. It was their first apprenticeship. program. And the first thing I asked was the security guard. Can I see Mitch Album's desk? And they took me up to the floor where your office was. I said, he doesn't work out of here anymore. He works in his home office. But you gave me a vision for what my future could be. Wow. Well, you see, you've answered your last question for me. You know, you are the answer to that question. You know, you're going to be hear longer than I am, most likely, and you're going to influence all kinds of people. And you're a ripple from my stone that you'll create ripples of your own and affect other people. And that's, I mean, I can't tell you how much that means to me. That's, that's, especially as you get older and you look

for some kind of significance, you know, in your life. That's it. You're it. So what a gift this has been to me just to, what a thing to hear. Mitch Album, thank you so much for talking to me. Oh, it's been a pleasure. Thank you for having me. Mitch Album's new novel is twice. On the next Fresh Share, we remember Diane Keaton and listened back to her 1997 interview. She talked about Annie Hall, the Godfather, and how she got her start in a production of hair. I hope you can join us.

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our consulting visual producer is Hope Wilson. Roberta Shurrock directs the show. With Terry Gross, I'm Tanya Mosley.