Mitch Albom Launches Wilton Library’s New ASML Author Series, Shares the Power of “Second Chances” and his New Book, “Twice”

Bestselling author Mitch Albom packed Wilton Library on Wednesday night, Oct. 29, to kick off the Library’s new ASML Author Series and introduce his latest novel, Twice, a time-bending story about regret, love and what we’d do if life offered a do-over.

Inspired by the evening’s location, Albom began where his own story started — in a library. As a young boy in South Jersey, he tried to check out Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea because it had a submarine on the cover. A librarian told him the book was “too hard” for him and steered the young Albom to the children’s section. When his mother found out on the drive home, she promptly turned the car around to confront the librarian.

“She said, ‘Did you tell my son a book was too hard for him? Never tell a child that a book is too hard for him,’” Albom recounted, adding, “Reading is why I became a writer. I owe libraries a great deal.”

“If only…”

Pivoting to Twice, Albom framed the novel around a familiar lament: “If only…”

“What would you go back and change, if you had this power?” he asked, noting that for many people the first thought for many isn’t about changing careers or where to live. What people regret most is about how they’ve lost someone they loved — what they should have said, what they should have done.

He read from the book’s opening, “a story about a young boy,” Alfie, who learns he can relive and redo any moment once. The gift, revealed as his mother is dying, comes with consequences: “The second time isn’t always better than the first.”

In Twice, Albom said, the one realm where do-overs fail is love. As Alfie’s grandmother warns, “true love is different.” Try to rewind it, and the original bond won’t return.
“True love is the journey,” Albom told the audience. “It’s not a buzzer-beater you replay. It’s the whole game.”

Albom also said that magic isn’t what’s needed to change our lives — just perspective.

“Second chances — we all want them — but the truth is, we get second chances every day. More than one. Think of what you can say to someone you care about in a minute that will change their day or even their life. Think of the way you can express your love to someone in a minute, forgive somebody in a minute, rekindle a relationship in a minute. Now consider that there are 525,600 minutes. That’s 525,600 chances we get each year to do just that,” Albom said, urging people not to wait until “the end” to try and time it out. “Take one of the chances and do it now.”

Albom traced his own unexpected do-overs: a detour from struggling musician to newsroom volunteer at the Queens Tribune, then sports columnist at the Detroit Free Press, and reflected how one moment in life can, as he put it, “turn your whole life.” 

In his case, the turn that “bifurcated” his life was in his freshman year of college, choosing not to drop a small sociology class when the professor started taking roll call. The professor, of course, was Morrie Schwartz, who would eventually become someone very important to Albom, and years later, the central part of Albom’s first book, Tuesdays with Morrie.

Publisher after publisher initially passed on his book. “Had it been just for me, I might have quit,” he said. “Because it was for Morrie, I pushed harder,” he said, adding that getting the book published would pay Morrie’s medical bills — and, Albom said, shifted his own compass from ego to service.

Albom’s Own ‘Twice’ Existence: Detroit and Haiti

That shift led Albom to launch SAY Detroit in 2006, now a multi-program nonprofit supporting Detroiters in need with housing, healthcare, education and jobs. After the 2010 earthquake that devastated Haiti, he began running an orphanage and school in Port-au-Prince — work he still visits monthly.

The children, he said, “were given a second chance” — beds, meals, medicine, school and family.

He shared the story of Chika, a vibrant 5-year-old from the orphanage whose terminal brain tumor brought her to the U.S. to live with Albom and his wife. Chika fought valiantly but died two years later.

After Chika’s death, Albom said he was furious at first with God.

“I could not understand why he would take a seven year old child from us… What did she do? What had she done?”

But then he shifted his perspective.

“As time passed, I began to think about that word ‘take,’ which got me thinking about the opposite, ‘give,’ and I realized that maybe the question to ask wasn’t, ‘Why did God take her?’ but ‘Why did God ever give her to us in the first place? What have we done to deserve those two amazing years as her parents?’

Albom said he saw it as a “twice” moment to turn anger into appreciation and turn
grief into gratitude.

“When you can turn your grief into gratitude, and when you can look at your day as something to be thankful for, no matter what came before, you’ll be amazed at how you’re open to another miracle coming along when you think the world is gray and gloomy and dark, you can’t see all the miracles that are there. But when you remove that and say, ‘No matter what happened yesterday, this could be an amazing day,’ you never know what’s going to happen.”

Not long after they lost Chika, another child arrived at his Haitian orphanage — a six-month-old girl named Nadie, weighing just six pounds and surviving only on sugar water. Her eyes wouldn’t open, and doctors weren’t sure she would live. Albom and his wife brought her to the U.S., feeding her every two hours and praying she’d grow stronger. Slowly, miraculously, she did.

Today, Nadie is thriving — laughing, learning and, as Albom joked, “calling me fat.” For him, she embodies the message of Twice: that life constantly offers new beginnings, even after heartbreak.

“We think second chances have to be magical,” he said, “but sometimes they come in the smallest, most fragile package — and they remind us that love, faith and care can rewrite what once seemed inevitable.”

As for whether he’d redo his own past if he could, Albom said the answer was, no.

“If I had to give up the lessons — had to forget the changes — then I would say, ‘No, thank you.’ Every moment after our first chance is a second chance,” he said. It’s called the next minute.

“[There are] so many mistakes that I wish I could correct, but if you told me that in doing so, I had to surrender the scars from those mistakes. I had to give up the lessons that I learned from those scars, I had to forget the changes that I made in myself as a result of their lessons — then I would politely say, ‘No, thank you.’ Because every moment after our first chance is a second chance to make things better. It’s called the next minute of your life. And the next minute of your life contains everything that you have learned up to that minute, and every opportunity to put it into the next minute and make your life a beautiful, beautiful thing,” he said.