Courtesy of St.Louis Public Library

“What if you got to do everything in your life — twice?” That’s the question that bestselling author Mitch Albom asks in his newest novel, “Twice.”

On Oct. 26, Albom was invited to the Clark Family Branch of the St. Louis County Library (SLCL) to discuss that very question. The SLCL Favorite Author Series, which co-sponsored the event with local bookstore The Novel Neighbor, is hosting a total of 150 authors this year, with over 35,000 readers in attendance, according to event coordinator Meredith Hopping. 

“Twice” was published on Oct. 7. and follows the life of a young boy named Alfie who discovers he has a special power: he can relive any moment in his life, but only once. Furthermore, Alfie’s power has a caveat — it doesn’t work on love. If Alfie falls in love, but he goes back and takes a different path in love, the person he fell in love with originally will never be able to love him again. The sold-out event was Albom’s third time speaking at SLCL. One audience member explained that she arrived at the library at 3:30 p.m. for the 6 p.m. talk, just so she could get a front-row seat. 

From the moment he stepped on stage, Albom captivated the room; he was warm, engaging, and funny. His semi-formal attire — dark gray slacks and a patterned sports coat over a navy button-down — was paired incongruously with comfortable-looking sneakers in a vibrant shade of blue accented by bright yellow lines. His welcoming and open demeanor invited the audience to both laugh and cry with him throughout the evening. 

While the event followed the release of Albom’s novel, the author’s hour-long speech focused more on his life and how his experiences led him to ask this question of himself: what if he could do it all over? Rather than being the next Elvis Presley (his childhood dream), life took him on a wild path, from his first meeting and later reconnection with a Brandeis University professor who was highly influential in his life, to the start of his charity work in Detroit, and to running an orphanage in Haiti after the 2010 earthquake.

Albom kicked off the evening by explaining his love of libraries, formed in his youth.

“I became a writer at the library,” Albom said.

As a child, he watched his mother scold a librarian for telling him a specific book was too hard. “The librarian wouldn’t let me take out the book that I wanted to take out,” Albom told his mother. “She said, ‘Why not?’ I said, she said it was too hard for me… [my mother] grabbed me by the arm, racing into the library, up to the librarian, and she started saying, “Did you tell my son that a book was too hard for him? Never tell a child that a book is too hard for him and never this child.” After that, Albom decided “this reading thing was really important if my mother was ready to deck a librarian over it.” 

Although he didn’t delve into the details or plot of “Twice,” Albom consistently tied his experiences back to the themes of love, second chances, and mortality that are expressed in the book, even reading several excerpts aloud to the audience.

Albom is best known for “Tuesdays with Morrie,” the nonfiction work that was on the New York Times bestseller list for four straight years. Published in 1997, Albom’s book explores life, love, and grief through a series of conversations between Albom and his former Brandeis professor, Morrie Schwartz. 

Schwartz was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), a progressive neurodegenerative disease, in 1994. After Schwartz’s diagnosis, he spent the last year of his life coming to terms with death, and through once-weekly conversations with Albom, he shared the wisdom he gained throughout his prolonged illness. Albom turned those conversations into a book to pay for Morrie’s medical bills, but, unbeknownst to him at the time, the book’s publication would end up altering the course of his life. 

“I began to realize that my ‘Twice’ moment had started alongside Morrie’s deathbed,” Albom said. “It was as if I was going back and starting over again. And my life gradually became more about being responsible for others.”

Albom has written both fiction and nonfiction works, but no matter the genre, his novels are consistently known for being tender, introspective, and often bittersweet stories. They explore the breadth of human experience and the realities of being human. Mortality is a central theme in many of his works, and “Twice” is no exception. 

“If we really kept our mortality in mind … we might live a bit differently here today,” Albom said. 

“Twice” speaks to a universal desire to erase our mistakes. But while the novel is about magically-gifted second chances, Albom explained that “the truth is, we get a second chance each day.” He urged the audience to seize those chances, rather than letting them pass us by.

However, the evening had as many moments of sorrow as it did of joy. Albom’s mother, so lovingly described in Albom’s library story, is the inspiration for a poignant line in “Twice” — “my mother died while I was trying to fly.” Alfie is describing his mother’s death, which occurred when Alfie was playing outside, pretending to be Superman. Albom drew on his own experience — his own mother passed away while Albom was on a plane flying home to Detroit, just after visiting her. 

But for all the moments of sorrow shared in the evening, Albom embraced what he learned at Morrie’s bedside — death is a certainty, so he chooses to use the time he has to focus on what Morrie described as the most important things: “compassion, awareness, and responsibility to each other.”

Albom ended the evening by answering an unspoken question that hung in the air — if he had the power to go back and do it all over, would he? 

“Here’s the thing about second chances,” Albom said. “If you asked me, ‘Are there things that you would like to do over again?’ I would say absolutely. So many mistakes I wish I could correct. But if you told me I’d have to surrender all the scars from those mistakes, all the lessons I learned from those scars, and all the ways I changed as a result of those lessons, then I would politely say, ‘No, thank you.’ Because every moment after our first chance is a chance to change things for the better. And we all do have the magical ability to do things twice. It’s called the next moment of your life.