This is Fresh Air. I'm Tanya Mosley. Today we begin our end-of-year retrospective, featuring some of our

favorite interviews of 2025. 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 was dying 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, loss,

and the search for meaning in the face of mortality.

His latest novel, Twice, starts with a question most of us have probably asked ourselves,

what if you had the power to redo any moment of your life? In the book, a man named Alfie

is born with that gift to go back and relive any moment he chooses.

But every second chance comes with 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 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 support 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.

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