Samantha Tidy Interviews Mitch Albom
Bestselling author of:
Tuesdays With Morrie
The Five People You Meet in Heaven
For One More Day
In March 2007, I had the good fortune to be able to personally interview Mitch Albom, which, seeing as I was referencing his novel The Five People You Meet in Heaven, in my Masters thesis at the time was rather handy. The fact that this book is the bestselling hardback first novel in US history, was not daunting at all. Not to mention, the 
fact that his first non-fiction book, Tuesdays with Morrie had held the record for being on the New York Times bestseller list for four years straight.
With the prospect of comparing his literary heaven with Alice Sebold's in The Lovely Bones, and analysing contemporary representations of heaven in literature, I suddenly had the ability to ask the author what was in his literary imagination! I sat down with Mitch one fine sunny Melbourne morning, at the Malthouse in Southbank, and asked him everything I needed to know.
Mitch Albom is a great person to interview. He's intelligent, patient, calm, handsome,
Many thanks to Mitch, and his publisher Hachette Livre, and in particular Nicola Pitt, for helping to arrange this conversation. It's a truly great interview to read, if you have ten minutes to spare.
An accompanying article, MITCH IN TIME, appeared in the Herald Sun Weekend Books section on 12th May 2007 (which you can also read, by clicking on the menu on the left).
Interview transcript, recorded and interviewed by Samantha Tidy, 22nd March 2007.
Question. So for Mitch Albom, does heaven exist? What is your heaven?
Yes, but as far as what it is, it’s really just my imagination and my desire. I am not a person who believes that any one religion has cornered the market on knowing what heaven is. There are so many different versions of it and so many different religions I’m not haughty enough to say one’s right and all the rest are wrong.
What I do believe, is that there is a thread between all of them that I believe is probably going to end up being correct. I don’t think any one version is going to be spot on. I believe that there is something beyond just this earth and our bodies being here as wormfood after we’re gone. I think it involves the soul and I think that it will involve some connection to humanity beyond this earth. I like to think that that extends to your own particular family and loved ones, but if you really believe in the idea of a soul and humanity as a whole then family really probably doesn’t necessarily exist in heaven. It’s all one big family and we’re connected to everybody, when you start to think about it, there’s a million ways to go. I just know it begins with a belief that there is something and you go from there.
Question: You have started three charities, each helping the homeless, the arts and the elderly. Tell me about your charities and why you started them?
When I was visiting Morrie Schwartz, which ended up becoming the book, Tuesdays with Morrie, one of the things he really admonished me for was, how involved I was or wasn’t with my community. He’d say “what are you doing for your community to help other people?” and I’d say “I give to charity.” “What do you mean you give to charity?” “Well, I write a cheque.” He told me, “Anyone can write a cheque. Involvement means your time, your effort. You’ve been blessed. You’ve been given a forum. People listen to you and people read you. It’s not enough for you to write a cheque. You have to get more involved with your community. You have a bigger responsibility because you have a voice in your community.”
Time To Help and S.A.Y. Detroit were formed directly as a result of Morrie making me feel guilty about what I should do and he was right. And so I try to use my platform to encourage other people to do for other people.
Time To Help gathers volunteers every month, up to 300 people for a single event and it goes out to the community in Detroit where I live. One month they’ll build a house for somebody with the “habitat for humanity” program. Another month it’ll be a food program, where the food that airlines don’t use is collected, repackaged and sent out to people who are hungry in Detroit. The food is okay, it’s just that they can’t keep it for more than 3 days. We might go to a shelter and throw a Christmas party at Christmas time for kids who are living in shelters without parents. And we’ve been doing it for ten years now. That’s 120 individual events that we’ve done. The whole idea is that we give an exposure to what it’s like to volunteer. It’s not that big a deal, you don’t have to sign your life away just because you agree to volunteer. Some people are afraid that if they start volunteering it never stops.
S.A.Y. Detroit is the homeless program. That came about out of anger because of the Superbowl. It was held in Detroit one year. We had never had it before. The game is on the Sunday. Friday of that weekend, they announced that they were going to give a party to the homeless. That’s what the city called it. And they were going to round them up and take them to a shelter where they could watch the game. But what it really was was that they were taking them off the street so that they couldn’t bother anybody. And they put them all into this one really big shelter, with a big screen television set. That was the extent of the party. And on Monday morning, when everyone went home, they were going to put them back out on to the street. Thank you, your party’s over.
Detroit is very cold at that time of year. It’s February. Its’ freezing, there’s snow everywhere. I got wind of this, and I ended up going to this particular shelter and I spent the day and night there. I wasn’t pretending to be homeless, I just went through the whole thing that they did. Same meal, same bed, same process, same standing in line trying to brush your teeth. I wanted to write a story about what it was like, not because I was pretending to be homeless – in fact they all knew who I was. The homeless guys knew me. I wrote a story explaining this situation, and saying what this was like. I said “if we can house these people for three days for a party, then the least we can do is do this for the rest of winter. How can you possibly boot somebody out into the snow?”
We needed to raise $60,000 to provide the same services as we did for those three days, until the end of the winter. And my goal with the story was to try to raise the money any way we could. We ended up getting $360,000 because people were so incensed by it. We had way more money that we knew what to do with. So that began the process of the charity called S.A.Y. Detroit, which gets donations for the homeless. The idea is that all the money is spent on tangible projects that improve the quality of life for the homeless. Nobody’s salary is paid. There are no administrative costs or anything. The shelters just have to say to us, “we need a kitchen.” How much is a kitchen going to cost? $50,000. So much money is wasted in these social services agencies. It disappears. With S.A.Y. Detroit, you have to prove that you are building something tangible to help the homeless. We bought a van and it goes and picks people up. We hired two doctors that are on full time to distinguish mental health people from non-mental health issues. We bought about 500 beds for one particular shelter. We provided milk. You couldn’t even get milk at one shelter so we got a year’s contract for milk. We built a day care centre for kids so that if you’re homeless, you can drop off your kids and look for a job. How are mothers who are homeless going to look for a job if they have infants? You can’t bring your baby to the job. All those kinds of things.
With the new book, Just One More Day, the publishers wanted to throw one of these book launch parties. They always try to put you in New York. Bikinis, ice sculptures and all the rest. I don’t live in New York. I live in Detroit. I thought, “I don’t want something for me, I want to use this event.” Going back to what Morrie said, I wanted to use this popularity that I have been given to raise money for the homeless. I asked Tony Bennett, and Hank Azaria, both friends of mine, and we rented out a really big theatre in Detroit. We had 3000 people attend a dinner and Tony Bennett sang and read from my book, and talked about his mother. Hank Azaria told some jokes. We had a whole bunch of homeless people who came up and told some of their stories. The evening began with this one guy on crutches, who came out alone on this huge stage, with this big spotlight. We had been rehearsing with him about what to say. He practiced it so hard. He said, “Hello my name is Ringo. And I’m homeless.” He told a story and the national anthem was sung by a choir of homeless women. By the end of the night, we had raised another $110,000. That went into the kitty. It’s a full time charity that just goes on year round. I’m happy about that. You wouldn’t know it but Detroit is just full of people out of work.
Question: Does Mitch Albom have any regrets? Any people in his life he’d like to spend one last day with, in his literary heaven?
I’d need a week. I’d want 7 days and one of them would be with Morrie. Not because I have so much regret, but my life has changed so much as a result of my time with him. He died before I ever wrote one word of that book. He never got to see any of it. It wasn’t supposed to be a big book. It was just a labour of love. I just did it to pay his medical bills. When he died, all he knew if that I had gotten one publisher. They had all said no to me. Everyone said “no, you’re crazy. Nobody wants to read a book about that.”
I got one publisher who agreed to do it and three weeks before he died I went to him and I said, “I got some great news. You know this little class that we’ve been taking notes on and everything. I got a publisher whose gonna put it in a book.” He said “Who?” I said, “Doubleday.” He said , “Oo, I heard of them.” And I said, “Not only that, there going to give us some money for it and I want you to take all the money to pay all your medical bills. So you’re family wont have to be stuck with the debt after you die.”
He cried. It was a big day for the two of us, and for me it was really the culmination of Tuesdays With Morrie. And then he died a few weeks later. And when I sat down to write the book it wasn’t like I was planning on reaching anybody besides my family and maybe a few people in Boston. Now it’s become such a thing.
I would love to have him with me for a day, and just wander around the earth and say “look at how many people were affected because you took the time to spend some time with me.” He didn’t have to do that, he was dying. He could have said, “look I don’t have time for you.” But he didn’t. One person touches somebody and you reach all these people. So that would be a nice day to have with him.
Question: Do you ever wonder if he’s with you now?
I don’t wonder. I know he is. I feel him when I talk about him. I feel him when I see his family and talk to his wife. I go to the cemetery and sit by his grave. I just get a sense. I believe that there is something. It doesn’t conflict with my belief system and I believe he had some sense of what’s going on here. It just feels too alive not to.
I had an uncle, who was kinda like a dad to me. He died when he was 42 years old. I was 22. I was with him, the last night of his life. I lived in an apartment just below him and his family. He had been sick with cancer, and had been in the hospital for weeks, and had come home from the hospital for one day. He said “I want out. I’m getting out of here. I’m heading home.” And that night, at 4 o’clock in the morning I got a phonecall saying, “Come upstairs I want you to watch the kids. Mike had to go back to the hospital. He’s not feeling well.” So I came upstairs at 4 o’clock in the morning. There’s that certain stillness and quiet at that hour when no one else is up in the apartment building. He came out. His skin was just yellow. I had some kind of sense that something was different about this moment. But I was a kid. I was 22 years old. I didn’t know what death was. Nobody had really died that I had cared about up until that point. We walked down the hallway and I had some sense that I should say something to him but I didn’t know what to say. He got into the elevator, and it was one of those movie moments, where the doors close. I just watched him and I said something like “don’t worry, I’ll take care of the kids” or something like that. The door closed and I never saw him again. He died a few hours later.
I’ve always had a lot of bad dreams about that night. I always wished I could have that to relive again. I’d like to tell him what I feel about that now and how his kids have turned out. They have kids of their own.
I’d like to just get that one again, you know, before the phone rang and start all over. I don’t know if you call that a regret, or just a sad sore point. But if I had a day back, that would be one of them.
Question: The themes in your first book, Tuesdays With Morrie deal with the finer details of old age and death, and the lack of dignity that can be endured when the body breaks down. Now ten years older, and ten years closer to old age, what is your own relationship with your mortality?
Before I started seeing Morrie, I was a very squeamish person. I hated hospitals. I hated sick people. I didn’t really like it when people talked about death. My parents would say, “You know when we’re gone…” and I’d say “Don’t say that!”
In the ten years that have passed, I’ve just seen so much of it, that I’ve accepted the fact that as Morrie said, it’s a natural part of life. We are all going to die. You have to have that bird on your shoulder that says, is today the day I’m going to die? A thousand days in a row the bird says no, you’re fine. Then one day, the bird says today’s the day. How are you going to live to be prepared for that?
I’m a little less shocked, a little less horrified by death. You look around, especially in my existence now, in the last ten years, so much of it is with sick people, hearing stories from sick people, going and visiting hospices and hospitals, from signing books for sick people, to answering phonecalls from people who say “ Would you please call my uncle, he’s dying from Lou Gherig’s Disease. He’d love to talk to you.” People at airports stop you saying my mother’s dying from cancer, can I talk to you about it. I’m so in touch with the world of the dying, that I can’t possibly think its not going to touch me.
I would say I am a little less horrified by it, and as a result, I am motivated to try and live my life differently to how I used to. I do have a finite sense of time being short. I don’t procrastination on things. Things need to be done before you die.
Question: What in your life led you to write about death, heaven…redemption? Were you raised a religious man? What are those influences?
I was raised Jewish. Judaism believes in the world to come, where the wrongs of this world, and the imbalance of this world, is balanced. In other words, the poor or the downtrodden are made whole. If you are a jerk, but you are really successful here, you’ll have your comeuppance there. I was raised with the idea that you have to take account of what you do in this world, as there will be a ledger at the end.
Heaven may be nothing more than God’s way of making you accountable for how you behave here on earth. Whether there is one, or isn’t one, or whether it’s a tangible place, whether it’s a place at all - we all want to put it into our terms here on Earth. It’s got to be a place, you have to arrive, you have to have a body, well why? It may be something we can’t even explain. The fact that there is something inside you that makes you feel that there is more beyond this world, and that you will be held responsible for it, changes your behaviour in this world.
If you don’t believe in heaven, if you don’t believe in some kind of afterlife, or some kind of retribution of how you’ve lived your life, there is no reason to behave yourself in any responsible, moral, ethical way on this planet whatsoever. You should get away with everything you can, sleep with everybody you can, take money from every body you can, behave irresponsibly. Why not? You’ll be primal. You’ll just go to all your primal needs. When you’re hungry, you’ll eat. When you want sex, you’ll get it. If you need money, you’ll grab it.
I think the whole thing about religion and why it works is because there is some kind of sense of accountability to a God, or to an afterlife. Sometimes the idea of heaven, in and of itself, is enough to create a spark of the divine. Whether you are right or wrong about it almost isn’t the point. It may be God’s invention to make them believe there is something else, because that’s what will make them behave. If you really believe that God is smarter than everybody, I wouldn’t put that past him.
Question: The Five People You Meet in Heaven seems to have many similarities to Dante’s Divine Comedy, in particular, Part 2: Purgatory. Eddie travels through five layers, whereas Dante, travels through seven. Eddie and Dante both arrive on shores before their path of redemption. Eddie and Dante both are submerged in water before being washed of the memory of sin. Have you ever read Dante’s Divine Comedy? Any influences?
I’m really happy to hear that. I’ve never read Dante; unfortunately my high school education did not include any of that. But I am not surprised to hear that water is cleansing. From baptism and all the way on, it’s kind of a religious theme anyhow. In my case, in that particular book, it was just because he lived by a great grey ocean, on an amusement park. It’s really just Coney Island, Atlantic City where I grew up. The idea of water was always a part of the landscape. I saw him ending in it and coming through it. It wasn’t because of Dante. But I’m sure subliminally, you think about cleansing. All those things influence your idea of an afterlife.
Question: Sport is about games, yet your novels carry heavier themes, of mortality and spirituality…These issues seem pretty hefty for a sportswriter. How do these two opposites reconcile themselves in you? Do you see them as opposites?
I think people sometimes want to classify you as a sportswriter like it’s a birth defect or something. It was just a job. I was a musician, before I was a journalist. Is it okay for me to be sensitive because I was a musician, would that make more sense to people? I got into sports because I love to write, and there was a job available and there are a lot of big stories in the world of sports. If you actually read my sports writing over the last twenty years, most of it is about people, about athletes that are dying. Or athletes who fought against incredible odds. It’s not just about winning or losing, or who strikes the ball, or makes touchdowns. I see that there are stories in every arena. There are stories in the world of sports, there are stories in the world of heaven and things like that, and if I am just a storyteller, it doesn’t matter where I am working. I think there is something we can learn in every walk of life.
I hear that question a lot, and they say sportswriter like they really mean, Neanderthal. Sportspeople think about deep things too, they are human beings.
Question: Do you see yourself as being a messenger of hope for people in a culture that doesn’t embrace death?
I don’t think that much of myself, but I can’t be dishonest and say that I haven’t received notes and emails, and personal accounts from people that say that they have been moved by my work, that the book changed their life in some way.
I had a guy come up to me once, after The Five People You Meet in Heaven came out. He was crazed. He pushed his way through a line, and kept repeating to me, “How did you know?” “I said, “What?” He said, “The last words that Eddie said in that book. My sister was in a coma for a year. When I went and saw her in her death bed that was her last word. She said ‘home’ and then just fell back and died.”
In my book, Eddie meets all these people whose lives have been touched and have been saved by him, and they all join together in a single word from God and the word was ‘home.’ This guy thought that I knew some kind of secret that I had been let in on. I tried to explain to him that it’s just a story, it’s just a novel. But when you have things like that happen, you realize that you are playing with some powerful things here. You do have to have a sense of responsibility.
Someone once used a term for me as “the king of hope,” and they were trying to poke fun of me. There are worse things to be called, in a culture where people are celebrated for their darkness, their cynicism, their irony. Sometimes people will criticize my work, and say it’s too sentimental, or it’s too hopeful. I always say, “I’ve watched people die. For better and for worse. And I can tell you this. Nobody’s last words were ironic.”
All these critics who think that if it’s not ironic, and it’s not dark, then its no good, don’t really understand about life and real people. They are not literati or people who somehow think they’ve got their culture worked out. They’re everyday normal people. Sentiment is a huge part of their lives. Everybody’s favourite song is a sentimental song. They want to feel something good, and hopeful.
I saw this guy who made a movie that had won a thousand awards. It was this dark film. No one went to see it of course. He was interviewed, and he was so cynical and he said, “I don’t believe in happy endings. To me, when movies have a happy ending, they just haven’t gone on long enough yet. Because all of life will be an unhappy ending.”
I don’t want to go through my life like that, and I don’t want to spread that kind of message to people, so I just see myself as a storyteller. I don’t see myself as anything else. I just tell stories for a living, but I can’t deny that they give people hope. I’m not trying to give them hope I’m trying to give myself hope. I write stories that I want to believe. I want to believe that you can get one day back with somebody, if only in your head. I would like to believe there are five people you meet in heaven that your life has touched. I write these books, because they comfort me first, but if they’re used to comfort other people as well, I’m alright with that. There are worse things that I could be doing with my life.