Tuesdays with Morrie was one of the defining books of the 1990s, selling millions of copies and remaining on bestseller lists for years.
It’s the autobiographical story of Mitch Albom, a successful but work-obsessed journalist, and his former college professor Morrie Schwartz. Sixteen years after graduating, Albom sees Schwartz on television speaking about his terminal illness. What begins as a farewell visit becomes a weekly ritual, a series of conversations about life, death, love and meaning, framed as one last class.
Nearly three decades on, as Breda Cashe and Pat Moylan’s new Irish production of the stage adaptation of the book arrives in Dublin, Tuesdays with Morrie is still finding new audiences.
One reason for its success is that Schwartz remains so compelling. He taught sociology at Brandeis University, in Massachusetts, during the Vietnam War, when the campus was intensely liberal and had a reputation for grading students generously to prevent them having to go to war. Schwartz, though Jewish, drew eclectically from a range of spiritual traditions, shaping a personal philosophy that resisted easy categorisation.
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As Albom puts it, teaching was central to everything Schwartz did, even in death. “He had the idea that his own death should be a lesson to others in how to live,” he says from his home in Detroit. “It was a class, a last class in life. And what better legacy for a class than to be taught over and over again, all over the world?”
The book and the play both attempt to recreate that experience of sitting with Schwartz.
For Albom the book has become a kind of companion. It surfaces in unexpected places: as a quiz question, a wedding reading, a line at a funeral. “It’s kind of become something that is a shadow with me,” he says, “a good one. It’s been the biggest thing I’ve ever been involved with in my life. Not just from a writing-success way, but in how I live.”
Hardly a day passes without someone referencing it, whether through emails, messages or encounters across the world. “Like you, calling from Ireland, where the play is about to be shown.”
Albom speaks warmly about Ireland, which he describes as one of the countries that have most embraced his work. His connection to the country was deepened by his friendship with his long-time Irish publicist, Margaret Daly, whom he lovingly described in a column as “your mouthy aunt, your unabashed grandmother, an advocate, a judge and jury, a firebrand, a whirling dervish”.
Her death, in 2019, marked a shift in his visits. “I loved going to Ireland, and I miss her terribly,” he says. “I’ve been back since, but it wasn’t the same without her charging into bookstores and demanding they put my books out front.”
From the outside, Albom’s career appears unusually varied. He began as a musician, then became a sportswriter and, later, a bestselling author of both fiction and nonfiction. Alongside writing, he is deeply involved in philanthropic work. In reality, he insists, it unfolded largely by accident. He volunteered at a newspaper while playing music at night, discovered an aptitude for journalism and went on to study at Columbia.
“I didn’t intend to be in sports,” he says. “But that was where the first job was offered. And the next job was based on the first job, and the third job was based on the second job. The next thing I knew, I was a sportswriter.”
Had things gone differently, he suggests, he might just as easily have ended up writing about food.
Still, he recognises the value of that background. It informed his writing style, which is economical and clear. “I’m really glad I had my background in sports writing. And there are a lot of well-known writers, from Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer, who cut their teeth on sports. I’m not comparing myself to them in any way, but I’m just saying it’s been proven to be a good training ground.”
Albom has remained rooted in Detroit throughout. When he arrived there, in 1985, he encountered a city marked by economic decline, unemployment and a certain defensive pride. “Detroit is often the butt of jokes,” he says; it now tends to be thought of primarily as a murder capital or a decaying post-industrial city.
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But he chose to stay, even as opportunities arose elsewhere. “This was the town that gave me my opportunity,” he says. “I wanted to always be grateful for that.”
That sense of obligation has shaped much of his life since. Prompted in part by Schwartz’s question “What do you do for your community?”, Albom began a series of charitable initiatives that have grown into a big commitment.
His organisation Say Detroit, which he set up in 1997, the year Tuesdays with Morrie was published, now runs multiple programmes, including support for homeless families, medical care for children, and educational and recreational facilities in some of the city’s most disadvantaged neighbourhoods. He also operates an orphanage in Haiti, travelling there regularly.
The through line, he says, is simple: giving. He recalls how visitors to Schwartz would arrive intending to comfort him, only to leave having unburdened themselves. Confused, Albom once asked why Schwartz didn’t simply accept their sympathy. “He said, ‘Mitch, why would I ever take from people like that? Taking just makes me feel like I’m dying. Giving makes me feel like I’m living.’”
It is a lesson Albom has carried ever since. “Nothing makes you feel as alive as when you give,” he says.
If Tuesdays with Morrie has drawn criticism over the years, it’s often centred on its overt sentimentality and wholesomeness. Why does Albom think those qualities provoke such hostility, such gleeful derision? He considers the question carefully. “I make a conscious choice to be hopeful and to try to spread hopeful messages,” he says. “And that’s not always in vogue in writing or in the arts.
“Critics seem to enjoy things that are negative more than positive, or that are hopeless more than hopeful. Perhaps they feel that it’s more real. I remember one critic who kind of didn’t like my work. He summed me up by saying, oh, he’s just the king of hope. And he meant it as a pejorative, as an insult. But I said, well, I’ll take that. I’ll take that any day.
“The thing is, I see more hopelessness than most. I spend a week every month in Haiti, a place where it’s easy to despair – extreme poverty, little electricity, constant violence. And yet people are hopeful about tomorrow. They talk about God providing, about a better day. I feel that if the people there, and the kids we raise, can be hopeful about life, then I have no right to be cynical. I’ve been given too much. And so have most of us here in America.
“So I’m not sure why cynicism reigns the way it does. Maybe because it’s easy, and it breeds on itself. But it doesn’t make me feel very good when I practise it. And I don’t believe it makes most people feel good when they practise cynicism.”
It’s an outlook that Albom tries to carry through all his work, and that he hopes audiences will take from the new production of Tuesdays with Morrie. “I find myself now being a lot closer to Morrie’s age than my age when I wrote it,” he says.
With that shift, some of Schwartz’s insights have only now fully revealed themselves. The final line of the book is: “The teaching goes on.” At the time, he says, he didn’t fully grasp what that would mean. “But here we are, 30 years later, and the teaching does go on, and the relationship goes on,” he says. “If people live a certain way and touch enough people, they’re not really gone when they die.”
Tuesdays with Morrie, featuring David Hayman and Fionn Foley, and directed by Andy Arnold, is at the National Opera House, Wexford, on Saturday, April 4th; and at the Gaiety Theatre, Dublin, from Tuesday, April 7th, until Saturday, April 18th
