Welcome to the Book Show, a celebration of reading and writers.
I'm Joe Donaue.
This is an off-the-shelf edition of the Book Show and partnership with Northshire Bookstore
and Saratoga Springs, New York, and recorded before a live audience.
In his new novel, The First Phone Call from Heaven, Mitch Album follows the residents
of the small town of Coldwater, Michigan, several of whom begin to receive phone calls
that seem to be from the dead.
The call soon becomes a sensational media story culminating in an international television
and internet broadcast that believers hope will prove the existence of Heaven.
And then at least one resident of Coldwater hopes will show that the calls are a hoax.
Mitch Album has written seven books, including the best-selling memoir Tuesdays with Mori
as novels include The Five People You Meet in Heaven and for one more day, Mitch Album
also works as a columnist and a broadcaster.
Please join me in welcoming Mitch Album to this week's Book Show.
Thank you.
Mitch Album, how are you, sir?
Great, thank you so much for having me.
Hello to everybody in Saratoga Springs.
Very nice to be here.
Thank you.
I'm so glad you're here.
I'm so glad.
I'm so glad.
I'm so glad.
Wow.
We're catching you at the tail under the book tour.
No, the tail beginning of the book tour.
The beginning tour, so we need to crash.
Yeah, the book just came out on Tuesday.
And so this is it.
It already feels like about seven weeks, but it's only been about four days and we're
working away across the whole country.
I'm very happy to be here and thank you to North Shore Bookstore for doing this.
I mean, there aren't that many independent bookstores.
Unfortunately, they're left in the country and I am a huge, huge supporter of them.
Without independent bookstores, there wouldn't have been a Tuesdays with Moriel.
I'll be happy to tell you that story at some point, but it wasn't the chains.
It was people, you know, in the old fashioned bookstore thing of you should read this here
to take it home and then someone else coming in and doing the same thing.
So I salute the nice people there and I thank them for hosting me.
The new book is, I, that's okay, give it up.
That's good.
The new book is the first phone call from heaven.
What got you thinking about this?
Well, to be honest, it was kind of a sad inspiration about the time that I was sitting
down the work on a new book.
My mother suffered a couple of very debilitating strokes that took away her ability to speak
and I haven't heard her voice now in about three and a half years.
And I was one of those kids, you know, my mom was the ultimate talker.
Any communication skills I have came from her and when I was a kid, I used to, you know,
have my hands over my ears saying, you know, when she's going to stop talking, but when
I can tell you that when it actually happens, it's the last thing you want.
And it got me thinking about the human voice, you know, because I can sit with her, I can
hold her hand, I can look at her, her body's there.
I don't know that she recognizes me or not.
But I really miss that sound of her voice.
And I notice how many people sort of save voice messages after somebody dies.
Have you seen that?
You know, even if the message is like, let's go to Target, they've got 50% off.
Somehow that's like precious.
That's like a Dead Sea scroll all of a sudden.
You know, you have to hang on to it.
And I just thought, you know, there's probably something there about the preciousness of the
human voice.
And I said, what happens about creative story where it's just voices talking to people.
No bodies, no ghosts, no anything, just the sound of a voice.
Would that be enough to sort of make you believe in a little miracle?
And I went from there.
The idea that you could get that phone call.
And here from, in most cases in the book, it's someone very close and someone that you
love and miss.
And newly departed for the most part.
And I think that's something that we all long for, isn't it?
Oh, I'm certain of it.
I'll probably be the most common sentence you hear is if I only have one more conversation.
Which is sad because it kind of means that there was something that we didn't say in our
last conversation.
I learned from my visits with Mori Schwartz when I was working, you know, what ultimately
became Tuesdays with Mori.
He would always talk about say everything that you have to say right now.
You don't ever know if it's going to be your last conversation.
So yeah, I think, I mean, the people who have read this book in the one week that it's
been out, you know, I've noticed that reading the comments and there's a lot of that like,
oh, what I wouldn't give for one of these calls.
So I imagine it's a pretty universal desire.
And the conversations that come are usually very brief and end quite abruptly because
you have to first suspend the disbelief and then by the time you get to want to talk
then the person is gone.
Well, there are several reasons I did that.
I mean, first of all, the story is about, as you say, it's a small town.
They start getting these phone calls, but it only happens in this one little town.
No where else on the planet.
And so when the news gets out, people start flocking to the town and people start worshiping
the people who are getting the calls.
People start bringing their own phones and holding them up.
You know, they start buying the same model phone as the ones that work to see if there's
something in the model.
You know, Samsung has a field day all of a sudden.
And then there's this one guy who just thinks that it's, this all has to be a hoax.
He's kind of a broken-hearted, bitter man.
He was in prison.
His wife died.
He was in prison for something he didn't do.
And when he comes out, he has to raise his little son by himself.
And one day the son comes home with a toy phone and says, when's mommy going to call us?
You know, because the whole town is kind of acting like this.
And he becomes so enraged in what he feels is false hope that he decides he's going to prove
single handedly that this thing has got to be a hoax.
And he starts digging in and digging in.
And it gets, you have kind of two stories.
You know, he's digging, there's more clues and there's more clues.
And meanwhile, the story's getting bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger.
And it culminates, as you say, with this planned, big broadcast of the first actual phone call
from heaven that the whole world's going to listen in on.
The ultimate mystery of life is going to be solved just as it seems that he's cracked
the code.
Well, in order to sustain a story like that, your conversations have to be a little mysterious.
They have to be brief.
They have to make the reader think, well, okay, but if it's really them, how come they're
not saying everything?
How come, you know, it's kind of, they're always ending kind of quickly.
So it's a bit of a way of suspending anyone jumping to too many conclusions, you know.
Plus, I don't know if you would think if you're getting a call from heaven, you're not
going to be on very long, right?
I mean, it's relatively expensive.
The roaming charges.
Yes, alone, just on that.
Why do you think that we are hardwired not to believe ultimately that that could happen?
Because we live in an age where everything has to have an explanation and everybody has
to be to blame for something.
Technology has basically made us feel like there's nothing we can't create and we can't
do and we can't come up with.
And the sentence, so why don't they just invent something that does this, is now become,
you know, basically give it till tomorrow and they will, you know.
But the more you do that, the more wonder you take out of the world.
And the more ego you kind of assign to man and the more you sort of assume there's nothing
on earth that man can't ultimately control.
Now if you're religious or perhaps even spiritual, you believe that there are certain things
that are a little bigger than us, that idea runs counter to that because if we could
control everything, then what do we need a larger force for?
What do we need to believe in a larger force for?
So I think we start to shrink our beliefs, our even our faith to some degree, the more
technologically competent we become.
In the first chapter of the book at the end, it says it was the day the world received
its first phone call from heaven, what happened next depends on how much you believe.
And that's for the people in that town and that's ultimately for readers too.
That's right.
That's right.
I always liken it to when someone loses someone, I've heard the story in some form or another
many times, they'll say, oh I went into my daughter's bedroom, she died a year ago and I was
sitting there on her bed and I was just crying, I was so sad and all of a sudden a picture
of her fell off the bureau and it landed at my feet and I know that that was a sign.
She was sending me a sign that everything's okay.
Now I could bring a physicist in and I'm sure I could explain why at that moment something
happened in the ground or whatever and the picture fell off, it won't matter.
To that woman that's exactly what happened and no scientific explanation will change that.
That's belief and the book is kind of pitched on that sort of folk room too.
If you want to believe it and if you believe that it's true, no amount of, it's like some
people see Jesus in a French toast and it's happened.
The English muffins, there's been all kinds of foods in which Jesus has appeared and mother
Mary too.
And you cannot convince the people that it's not and I don't think you have to.
You know kind of one of the underpinnings of the book, I don't want to give away the
ending or anything like that but one of the principles underneath is if it's a miracle
to you, it's a miracle.
You don't have to prove it to everybody else in the world for you to believe it.
So in writing it, how much are you thinking about that are you concerned whether people
believe it or not?
Well, I have a job as a storyteller not to end the book before the book ends.
Otherwise why write, you know why write the 300 pages if everybody already knows what's
happened in a 200 pages.
So I have an obligation to juggle and I did that for example with the five people you
mean heaven.
If anybody read that book, there was about five different people that this guy meets
but he has one question for all of them.
He keeps asking, did I save this little girl, did I save this little girl?
But you know if I had the second person answer, why have the other three people?
So you know what have been a really short book?
It was short enough as it is.
So some of that is just sustaining storytelling.
And this book is longer for you.
Yeah.
Is that a 100 page longer?
It's a boring piece for me.
You know the funny thing about the reason people ask me why, you know your books are so
small.
I'll tell you the truth, not too many people know this.
But Tuesday's with Mori which was only written to pay more medical expenses.
It was not supposed to be some kind of popular book.
I mean it was a labor of love.
We only found one publisher willing to do it very late in the game.
Most people told me no.
Most people told me no one would be interested in a story like that.
You can't write it.
It's a sports writer.
It's depressing.
All kinds of reasons.
And so I found one publisher that gave us the money to pay his medical bills.
I gave it to Mori and then that was it.
And when I wrote the book I had one directive in mind and that was just don't overdo it.
Don't you know it was sad enough.
Don't use a lot of fancy words and be overly modland.
Just tell the story simply and it'll be beautiful as it was.
So I was so green to the process that the contract called for a 350 page book.
So I was typing triple space or whatever and I got to 350 pages and I didn't know how
they put it together or whatever.
So I sent them about 350 pages and I got a call about four or five days later.
They said listen we have a problem.
I said what's a problem.
They said well we put the book into a type set and it's about 180 pages.
And I said well that's all I got.
I mean I had said everything I wanted to say.
Is that like I could make up more like Wednesdays with Mori or something.
So it was a mark of the fact that the book really wasn't that big to them.
It wasn't a big deal that they said don't worry about it.
We'll just make the book smaller.
And they did.
You know all the books are this petite size because if they have made it a full size book
it would have looked like a comic book.
And so from that point forward all my books were kind of that size because when you sell
18 million copies of a book they want to do the same thing over again I suppose.
So that's why my books are small.
And this one is about 100 pages longer than anything I've ever written.
It also has way more characters and it's more.
But actually to me I don't like to write long if it feels long.
And if a story feels long I come from a newspaper background originally.
I'm very sensitive to when I'm losing the reader.
You know usually I have to worry about a tire ad or something like that.
It's going to interrupt the story right.
Get in everything you can before you hit the tire ad.
But this did not feel long to me.
I was surprised when I found out how long it was because it really moves and there's
a lot of sort of thriller aspects to it and it races and it gets faster and faster and
faster.
But yes for those who want more pages for their money it's the same price as the last
one but you get a lot more pages.
That's good.
I guess on the book show this week is Mitch Album.
The new book is the first phone call from heaven it is published by Harper.
When you start to write the book and tell this story one of the fascinating aspects is
we were in about there's a little there's a history lesson in here as well about the
telephone about Alexander Graham Bell.
Yeah.
It was a history lesson to me too.
I have to admit I didn't know this going into the book.
But about a third of the way through I wanted to just have a paragraph really about how
the phone was invented.
So I began to sort of research it a little bit and what I discovered let me down this
rabbit hole that it ended up being a theme and a parallel story that ran throughout the
book.
Alexander Graham Bell most of you know invented the telephone or at least got credit for
it.
There were about five or six other people who might have invented it.
But he actually invented it by accident.
He was trying to help his wife who was deaf and he was trying to find some way for her
to speak through vocal vibrations and then it was supposed to go through a wire and move
a stylus and she'd be able to read the things that the stylus made and kind of learn to make
sounds like that.
And he somehow discovered you can put sound through electricity and electricity can go
anywhere.
Next thing you know there was a telephone but it was actually the telephone was sort of
born from love.
You know it was created to try to help a man trying to help his wife and the very first
conversation that was ever spoken on a telephone actually took place between Alexander Graham
Bell and his assistant who went in another room about twenty feet away and they closed the doors
and the sentence that he chose to speak was come here I want to see you which to me is
just like almost goose bumpies like really the very first phone conversation which separated
people the first time people could ever converse without having seeing one another the sentence
was come here I want to see you you know it's like okay now that we're apart come here I
want to see you.
And really if you think about every phone conversation that's emotional between people there's
that overtone in it you know whether it's a grandparent talking to a grandchild because
they're not there or lovers talking you know I was been a wife or whatever it's a substitute
but it's not the real thing and you know my mother used to say when email was invented
I said you know mom I got this great new thing email you know you should get it I can email
you can send you a message all the time she said I'm never doing that I said what do you
mean you're never doing that she said if I do that you won't call me and and she said
I want to hear your voice I don't want to see a bunch of words on a on a computer I want
to hear your voice and it occurs to me that our generation and the next one is getting
further and further away from talking to one another even as our phones get more and
more part of our lives we use our phones now for almost anything but talking you know
everybody has a teenager knows exactly what I'm talking about he has a phone why doesn't
he answer it you know no kid answers a phone yet you text him and he'll send you right
the back so he's clearly holding it why doesn't he answer it because they don't like to
talk on the phone and so the art of communication is disappearing despite a device that's supposed
to improve it.
So that's why I will that whole sort of out to the grand bell thing so it was never the
first text from heaven.
No, I don't think that would be worth it.
It was never an idea.
Oh no, probably reach a lot more young people if I named it that.
You write in the uncountable human phone conversation since then that concept has never been
far from our lips come here I want to see you inpatient lovers long distance friends grandparents
talking to grandchildren the telephone voice is but a seduction a breadcrumb to an appetite
come here I want to see you and again in most cases these characters want these people
to to come and see them and and they do they have that that first phone call is is a breadcrumb.
Although there is one character who gets calls that he doesn't want because I thought that
made it more interesting you know not if it was open communication from heaven would
it just be people who you missed or would somebody who you would change your number so that
they couldn't reach you suddenly have some divine help on the other side and so there
is one character who's sort of haunted by his calls and he tries to run away from it and
he changes his number he throws his phone out and the voice keeps finding him and so it adds
another dimension to it but yeah for the most part they they want to be in touch with but
there there was a point where one of the characters is a father who lost his son in the war
and in one of their conversations he says something in the son laughs and the father breaks down
because he realizes how long it's been since he heard his son laugh and I think that that's
very true you know I know well with Mori I go back and listen to those tapes periodically and
you know all the wisdom is all wonderful obviously but whenever I tell a joke because we spend a
lot of time joking around everybody thinks that was so serious it wasn't 90% of the time we were
we were cracking each other up in some way because you know when you're dying or whenever you're
in a difficult situation humor is precious you know you hang on to every laugh you can get and I
really miss the way he laughs and I think we all do you know laughter everyone has a signature
laugh you know whether you go like that or whatever and you know I so it's not just even the
conversation sometimes it's the laughter that they miss I'm so glad we have that on tape actually
yeah the whole interview will be shrunk down to it's gonna be my new ringtone yeah
it seems that the book works in so many levels of whether you are a believer or not a believer and I
assume that's that's your audience right I mean those the people there are people in this in this
world who are yes waiting for that eternal place and hoping to get to heaven or people who don't
believe there there is anything or or don't know or or have a completely different
view and but but for you as a writer that ultimately doesn't matter no I sometimes I think
mistakenly get characterized as as a religion writer or faith writer or inspirational writer and
I don't think I deserve any of those titles because I think they belong to people who have
much greater talent and knowledge than I do I'm not knowledgeable enough to be a religious writer
of any kind or even an inspirational writer and certainly not a how to writer I'm just a storyteller
it just so happens I guess that the idiom that I like to work in just like John Grisham there's
always a lawyer in one of his books or Stephen King there's usually some kind of monster in mine I
I deal with hope and I just I enjoy hope I am unabashedly a fan of of that sensation or that
emotion and you know I just sort of construct stories that in the end provide some sort of hope
or maybe a little inspiration or feel good or make you think about them afterwards and it seems
that they've been adopted by faiths or adopted by people who do inspiration or adopted by but I didn't
set out to write them that way I just set out to write a story that is about something that
matters to me and I think probably might matter to other people but I've always been amazed at
where they've they've ended up you know like that that Tussus Memorial has ended up in high schools
across the world I mean China they teach Tussus Memorial in high school in China Japan Australia
Norway Brazil I mean all kinds of I didn't I never intended to be homework you know that was the
the last thing I would have done so you just don't know once you write a book it's not yours anymore
it's it's out into the world and it gets you know happily for me I mean it gets taken and adopted
by many many places but it seems like a lot of as you've correctly sort of noted a lot of faithful
people and religious people have have taken to my books but I can't say I've aimed them that way
and you've written about faith I mean it's obviously something you you thought about the last
nonfiction book is about faith and about your and about your journey and this this really has
open doors for you to explore that in your own life as well yeah I have a little faith was a
wonderful period of time in my life where I reflected an eight year journey with a rabbi who
would ask me to write his eulogy and then proceeded to live eight more years so pretty so I thought
he was going to write mine you know and and a pastor in Detroit who was running a church that
basically was comprised of homeless people and had a big hole in a trough and I saw that as an
opportunity to just do a book about faith which I have great admiration for and no prejudice towards
one way or the other I'm a person that is totally open to all faiths as long as they're practiced
purely and without without hate and and one of the dogmas is not we're right there wrong let's kill
them you know that that's not faith that's hate but anything that that thinks that there's something
bigger and and we ought to be hating ourselves a little bit is okay with me and and yet you know
I a lot of faith oriented books are very dogmatic and they tell you this is the way and that's it
and and that's okay but I certainly wasn't capable of writing a book like that and then along came
this opportunity to take these two sort of stories that were quite different and put them together
and show that there's an undercurrent of similarity between all faiths that I really wanted to jump on
and say boy I don't think I've ever read a book like this that combines an African-American pastor
in the inner city in Detroit with a suburban 91 year old Jewish rabbi if there is another one
like that tell me well it's too late don't tell me now but so I wrote that book and that was a great
you know I really enjoyed doing that well the new novel is the first phone call from heaven it is
published by Harper we enjoy hearing from our listeners about the show you can email us at book
at wamc.org and you can listen again to this or find past book shows at wamc.org
Mitch Alvin thank you so much for being with us. Oh my pleasure I really enjoyed it.
So we do it produces our program this off the shelf edition was presented in partnership with
Northshire bookstore it was recorded in Saratoga Springs New York and engineered by Katie
Britain bookmarks for next week and thanks for listening for the book show I'm Joe Donnelly
