About halfway through Tuesdays with Morrie, the book that took Mitch Albom from local columnist to internationally famous and bestselling author, he asks his old professor Morrie Schwartz, who was then dying from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, aka Lou Gehrig’s disease, about aging. Albom was 37 at the time and wanted to know if Schwartz really meant what he said about getting older being a good thing.
“If aging were so valuable, why do people always say, ‘Oh, if I were young again.’ You never hear people say, ‘I wish I were sixty-five,’” Albom recalls in the book. Schwartz responded: “You know what that reflects? Unsatisfied lives. Unfulfilled lives. Lives that haven’t found meaning. Because if you’ve found meaning in your life, you don’t want to go back. You want to go forward. You want to see more, do more. You can’t wait until sixty-five.”
Albom turns 67 this month. It’s been 30 years since he asked that question and 28 since the book was published, a time when Albom says he was still carrying the frantic ambition he’d had as a younger man and was worried about turning 40.
On the surface, it might appear he still has that same youthful ambition — Albom is a busy guy. When I set up our interview with his team, I asked for two hours but was quickly informed that no one gets two hours with Mitch Albom, outside his family.
It’s easy to see why.
After about 40 years, he’s still writing his sports column for the Detroit Free Press, the gig that brought the New Jersey native to Detroit in the first place. On weekdays, he’s on WJR for The Mitch Albom Show. He runs nine charities he’s founded through his nonprofit, SAY Detroit, which since 2012 has raised more than $14.5 million to help veterans, students, and people who need assistance with housing and medical care. That’s not to mention that for the last 15 years, he’s run an orphanage in Haiti, making regular visits there and helping Haitian orphans get medical attention in Michigan. He’s doing all of that when he’s not at his desk writing books, which can be counted on to become immediate bestsellers. He has one coming out in the fall. I take the 30 minutes.
For all that, he looks relaxed when we meet in a small studio in the back of WJR, eight floors up in the Fisher Building, about half an hour before The Mitch Albom Show is set to start. He sits casually in a studio chair, hands dangling from the armrests. He’s dressed in black jeans and a plain navy sweatshirt, a silver watch hanging loosely from one wrist.
“I don’t do anything that I don’t like. If you believe that old expression ‘If you do what you like, you’ll never work a day in your life,’ I have never worked a day in my life,” he tells me. But then he reconsiders.
“Yeah, I don’t think it’s quite like that. There are days where it feels like work, but I enjoy the radio show, and I still enjoy writing my column. In fairness to the people who work in each of those fields full time, I don’t do full-time anything, and that’s the way that I’m able to do all this.”
Still, he says, it’s different than in his youth, a time driven by a need to succeed, to say yes to every project, to stave off the fear that all he was accomplishing might be taken away. Now, two years beyond the age he didn’t think he’d look forward to reaching, he says he’s driven by something else entirely. His first ambition was to be a musician — a drive that took him all the way to Greece’s island of Crete for a lounge singer gig before he moved to New York playing nightclubs — usually on Monday nights when the places were empty. He later set his sights on journalism, getting a master’s degree from Columbia University and freelancing for Sports Illustrated and The Philadelphia Inquirer before getting his first sports columnist gig in Florida. Then Detroit, where he continued to hustle, he says, until, well, he didn’t anymore. He met Morrie, rethought his priorities. They’re what he focuses on now.
“All of it serves a purpose of being able to call attention to things that I think are important. The radio show does that. The column does that. I don’t need it for ambition anymore. I don’t need to prove myself in the newspaper world or the radio world … in terms of ‘Hey, world, look, I can do this.’ Those who think I can do it think I can do it. Those who think I’m not good at it are going to think I’m not good at it,” he says. “But it does give me a forum. I can call attention to charitable things … and a message of what I think is important in life, which is hope and consideration and, you know, humanity. That we’re all more alike than different and we have an obligation to one another.”
The day we meet is a blustery day in January — Jan. 27, to be exact, International Holocaust Remembrance Day, 80 years after Jews were liberated from the Auschwitz concentration camp. It’s a fitting day to meet, as the Holocaust is something he writes about in his latest book, The Little Liar. The novel is set during World War II and tells the story of a Jewish boy, Nico, who never lies but is duped into telling other Jews that the trains they’re boarding are headed for places with new homes and jobs. The trains are headed to Auschwitz.
Later, during his show, to commemorate the day, Albom quotes from his book: “What they saw, what Nico saw, none of them could believe. Amidst the smoldering remains of the camp, starving prisoners sat motionless in the snow, staring, as if someone had just awakened them from their graves. Hundreds of corpses pocked the frozen ground, unburied, flesh rotting. … Nico felt his legs trembling. He couldn’t find his breath. Until this point, like many soldiers around him, he had believed places like Auschwitz were labor camps. Hard labor, certainly. But not this. Not a killing ground. He had honestly expected to find his family alive, waiting for liberation. But [Hitler’s] deceits had fooled even the little liar. It was left to Truth to open his eyes.”
The book is set in Salonika, which had the highest concentration of Jews in Greece.
Whenever Albom is asked about his book, he tells interviewers he wanted to write a book about truth and lies, which is why The Little Liar is written from the point of view of the angel of Truth. The Nazis weren’t able to carry out the atrocities they did because they had bigger guns, but bigger lies.
“We live in a time where we’re choosing our truths,” Albom says. “I thought this was a really important topic for our time.”
There’s a story Albom likes to tell when people like me sit down to ask him questions. It happened a long time ago. He can’t remember what paper it’s in (I haven’t been able to find it, either), but once upon a time, someone wrote an article and called Albom the “king of hope.” They did not mean it as a compliment.
“Certain literary critics prefer darker conclusions and less hopeful, more realistic literature, and that’s all I can think of,” Albom says of the descriptor.
He puts the word “realistic” in air quotes, and within those air quotes is the split among readers — those who find him a source of inspiration and those who roll their eyes. The kind of people who love Tuesdays with Morrie and those who don’t. Reviewers have praised him for the light he can shine on how all people, regardless of circumstance, can approach life with a more hopeful outlook. Other reviewers have panned him, calling his writing syrupy, cliché, oversimplified. When I told my mother I was meeting him, she was delighted. A journalist friend expressed his condolences.
Using Truth as a narrator for The Little Liar fits Albom’s style, as most of his novels have some supernatural element to them and read like fables as much as novels. Morrie was followed by his first novel, The Five People You Meet in Heaven, which largely takes place exactly where the title suggests, and he’s written another Heaven novel since. Father Time himself plays a role in The Time Keeper (2012), and The Magic Strings of Frankie Presto (2015) is narrated by the voice of Music. In The Stranger in the Lifeboat (2021), one of the characters is God.
It’s not hard to see where some of the criticism comes from. Anyone who takes a sunny view of the world these days is asking for it. Being hopeful can be insulting, even, to those who are going through awful times. And what would some bestselling writer know about those kinds of things anyway?
Well …
One place such a critic might turn is Albom’s 2019 memoir Finding Chika, which chronicles the two years that one of the now-countless Haitian children Albom has helped spent in the United States receiving care for a rare and aggressive brain tumor. Albom is the guardian of all the children at the Have Faith Haiti orphanage, but in those two years, Albom and his wife, Janine Sabino, went far beyond being guardians. Wanting to remain respectful to Chika’s birth parents, they were careful never to say that they were her mother and father. And while I understand that, I’ll say this: They were her mom and dad, and Chika died in their arms. Albom writes about this moment thoroughly, down to her final breath.
There are a lot of things that keep Albom up at night. When I ask him what they are, he rocks back in his chair and looks around him as though all his worries have been there all the time, hanging around him like a swarm of flies he can’t escape.
There’s his health, he says, given that he’s getting older and people he knows, “friends — not parents, but friends,” he says, are dying. There’s the health of his family. And the nonprofit, and what will happen to it when he’s gone. Ditto the orphanage. Someone will have to keep that going, too — it only exists now because 15 years ago, after a massive earthquake, Albom took it over from its founder, who could no longer keep it up. Even now, though he has people taking care of it when he’s not there, he knows it’s not safe.
“It’s going to sound like hyperbole,” he tells me, “but living in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, is one of the most dangerous places on Earth right now. There’s killing that goes on outside of our gates where people are murdered and cut up. Their body parts are left in the street. We know
people who have been kidnapped. We know people who have been murdered.
We know people who have been shot. We have taken in kids because their parents were murdered,” he says. “I worry about that every single day of my life. I talk to my patient director every single day. ‘How bad is it? Do we need to flee? How do we get out?’”
Call his writing what you will, but naive about the horrors of the world Albom is not. Besides, if his writing style is what has crowned him the king of hope, it’s a crown he says he’ll wear with pride.
“I think hope is not only a good thing — it’s maybe the most important thing. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve lived through some things and seen some things that, you know, I didn’t always see when I was younger. I think hope is the lifeblood of humanity. It’s what keeps us going to the next day. And I search for that, not only in my writing but in my life.”
Albom’s Book Twice, coming out Oct. 7, is about a young man who discovers he has a unique power — the ability to do everything in his life over a second time. The catch? He has to live with the consequences of that second chance, a caveat that will have greater consequences when he’s met the love of his life and has some big choices to make.
It’s a theme that seems fitting for a writer who is approaching 70 and perhaps thinking back on past decisions. Our conversation never gets that far — I bring up the Lions, who just ended their season with a depressing demonstration of Murphy’s law against the Washington Commanders. We lament the loss and talk about next season until someone knocks on the door and Albom shakes my hand and heads for the studio, getting back to work.
Say What?!
Started in 2006, SAY Detroit focuses on helping Detroiters in need through programs including an after-school motivational learning center, a free family medical clinic, and a housing program.
One of its signature fundraising events is the annual SAY Detroit Radiothon in December, where for 15 hours, Mitch Albom broadcasts live from Somerset Collection, sharing SAY Detroit’s success stories and interviewing notable personalities. Among the slate of celebrities last year were long-time Simpsons voice guru Hank Azaria, actor Jeff Daniels (founder of Chelsea’s Purple Rose Theatre Co.), and Detroit Lions head coach Dan Campbell.
Since its inception in 2012, the event has raised nearly $14.5 million to support SAY Detroit’s initiatives.
Here are some standout numbers from SAY Detroit’s latest report:
1 MILLION
As in dollars. The amount Matthew and Kelly Stafford donated to help open The Kelly and Matthew Stafford & Friends Education Center that would expand the offerings for Detroit kids through the SAY Detroit Play Center. Their donation was matched by the A.A. Van Elslander Foundation and the Clarence and Jack Himmel Foundation. The facility boasts six multipurpose classrooms, a theater, learning labs, and more.
16,000+
The number of meals served to kids through the SAY Detroit Play Center during the 2023-24 school year.
13,000
Give or take, the number of homework assignments that were checked for completion at the SAY Detroit Play Center during the 2023-24 school year.
4,182
The number of patients helped in 2023 at the SAY Detroit Family Health Clinic.
600
The number of bicycles refurbished in 2023.
260
The number of volunteers who helped SAY Detroit in 2023.
100
The percentage of eighth grade and 12th grade SAY Play students who graduated from their respective schools in 2024.
This story originally appeared in the May 2025 issue of Hour Detroit magazine. To read more, pick up a copy of Hour Detroit at a local retail outlet. Our digital edition will be available on May 5.
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