Beyond the plot

Mitch Albom has set up four charities since writing the best-selling memoir, 'Tuesdays With Morrie'. Photo / Getty Images

The question of faith has been engaging Mitch Albom a great deal recently. Albom is the Detroit-based author of the best-selling memoir of all time, Tuesdays With Morrie, a book that affected his life just as much as it did those of its many readers. A collection of wisdom and life lessons learnt from his mentor, a dying professor, it was written initially to help pay the old man's medical bills.

Until then, Albom says, he had been entirely focused on chasing career success as a sports writer and broadcaster. But after "finally doing something nice for someone else", he re-evaluated his whole attitude.

That book came out in 1997, and to this day, Albom is stopped on the street by people who tell him how it touched their lives. "I've learnt how many sad stories there are in the world," the author says when we meet over coffee in Auckland's Westin hotel. "The people around us now may seem to be just having lunch, but if you pulled them aside and asked what is breaking their hearts right now they would have an answer for you."

What Albom realised was that people were hungry for stories that touched them deeply and nourished their spirits. "By the time the book came out I had a lot of ink beneath my fingers," he says. "I'd written a great deal of trivial stuff about games and sport. To me Morrie was a nice, simple story. I didn't realise how significant it was going to be. It was the reaction to it, how people were so moved and how it gave them comfort. I had no idea you could impact people in this way. So I started to think about how I could tell other simple stories that had large themes. Having written enough trivial things for ten lifetimes I guess I was attracted to something that people would remember for more than just the plot."

Two novels followed, both essentially homilies designed to make readers think about the meaning of their lives.

More recently, Albom has released a successor to Tuesdays With Morrie, a non-fiction book that tells the story of two men, their different faiths and the impact they had on his life.

It began in a similar way to that first best-selling memoir. Albom started visiting regularly with the 82-year-old Rabbi from his old hometown who'd asked him to deliver his eulogy. This inspirational man - who Albom calls "the Reb" - shares his life philosophies of kindness, tolerance and talks a lot about the meaning of faith.

So far so predictable. But Albom didn't want to repeat the theme of learning lessons from an older man. It was only when he became involved with a drug dealer turned pastor who works with the homeless in Detroit that he realised he had a book on his hands.

At first he admits to being suspicious of Pastor Henry. The pair didn't share the same faith and so, says Albom, "I really didn't trust any of it at first. I thought it's not mine, so it can't be good."

But then Albom saw how the pastor fed and sheltered the homeless regardless of their religions, without trying to push Jesus at them.

"Hundreds of people slept on the floor of his church in sub-zero temperatures," he says. "And he would drive round the neighbourhood giving out food. As I spent time with him I began to admire how he led his life just as I'd admired the Reb. And I thought no one ever writes a book about faith that involves more than one. So I decided to try to make a story about tolerance, two faiths in one book."

The result, Have A Little Faith (Little, Brown) tells the stories of these two very different men, the Jew and the Christian, sharing their wisdom and showing their essential goodness. Messages are preached, similar to those in Morrie, but Albom believes it is a significantly different book.

"You could say all my books to some degree are kind of connected to that theme, there are lessons to be learned from them, but then you can say John Grisham's books have lawyers in them, that's who I am," he says.

Since its publication last year, Have A Little Faith has had a huge impact on Pastor Henry, his congregation and the homeless of Detroit. Albom set up a charity to raise funds to fix a gaping hole in the church's roof. "We got money from 30 countries including New Zealand," he says. "Trucks loaded with shingles pulled up and all the people who use the church were there. It was a real cold day just before Christmas and they made this human ladder and handed the shingles up and they were singing the Hallelujah song. So something good came out of a story I'd told and yeah that's a very appealing thing to a writer."

A Hole in the Roof Foundation, which has gone on to repair an orphanage in earthquake-hit Haiti, is the fourth charity Albom has set up since writing Tuesdays With Morrie. His philanthropic efforts include a volunteer organisation called A Time To Help, a family clinic dedicated to homeless children and their mothers and a fund to help disadvantaged young people participate in the arts.

"I live in a really downtrodden city," explains the 51-year-old author. "And I've been given a voice so I can rouse people up. ... When you finish a book that gives you satisfaction but on a grander scale in terms of achievement you do a lot more when you do charitable acts. It kind of puts the book business in perspective."