We got a chance to talk on the phone with Mitch Albom about his new book The First Phone Call from Heaven. He is a best-selling author, journalist, television and radio broadcaster. His books have sold over 35 million copies worldwide. This Tuesday evening 12/03 he will be at Barnes and Noble at the mall (4940 Monroe Street) for a book signing.
Matt Breneman: Mitch we wanted to talk about your new book. So, where did your inspiration come from for writing The First Phone Call from Heaven?
Mitch Albom: Actually it came from a fairly sad occurrence a few years back when I was starting to conceive of it. My mother suffered from a couple of major strokes and lost the ability to speak and she hasn’t spoken in 3 and a half years. I realized I hadn’t heard her speak in all that time and I really miss her voice. This got me thinking about the human voice and connections that we make through the human voice and how important that is. I started to think, boy, if I could do a story where people were able to start hearing these voices again it would be very poignant. I know people who have hung on to voicemail messages when they lose someone, even if the messages are just “hey I’m coming over tomorrow for the barbecue,” that sentence suddenly becomes important because you can hear the timber in their voice. That became sort of the general inspiration for the book. It’s always been something I’ve wondered about if there was ever really proof of heaven that everybody accepted the stories – people died and saw the light and came back – so if people started reaching out how would that change the world?
MB: So does the book discuss the implications of the world changing? Does it change the war scene overseas or…?
MA: Well, let me give you a bit of the plot summary, this may make it easier. What happens is the phones start ringing in this little town in northern Michigan. One day the phones start ringing from people in heaven. It’s just this one little town and it only happens to some people in this town. Nowhere else in the world is this happening, so when news start to leak out that this is happening the whole world starts to descend on this town and people start coming because they want to be a part of the miracle or they come to protest because they don’t believe it. Then the media gets really involved… meanwhile there’s the protagonist who’s kind of a broken man who lives in this town, he just got out of prison and his wife died while he was in prison. So, he’s totally non-believing, being very cynical about everything while he’s trying to raise his 12 year old son by himself. One day the boy comes home from school with a toy phone asking “when is mommy going to call us?” At this point he thinks his son is being brainwashed so he sets out to prove that the whole thing is a hoax so he can show his son that there’s no such thing. As he’s digging and digging and getting closer to what he thinks is happening this phenomena is getting bigger and bigger, more people and more media and finally it kind of culminates to be a few days before Christmas with this massive broadcast to show the world, live, an actual phone call from the other side. There is a point in the story where the whole world is tuned into this little town waiting for the phone to ring with a voice from heaven.
MB: I’ve noticed a trend recently on the screen or in literature… there’s not necessarily a completely good-guy or completely bad-guy anymore, so is our main guy a true protagonist or is he kind of an anti-hero that has a lot of flaws?
MB: No, he’s not an anti-hero, he’s the fulcrum through which people sort of have to make their minds up because he’s the only one searching to get to the bottom of it – everyone else is enraptured by it. You start to root for him to some degree, some people will root for him to be right and some people will root for him to be wrong. But he’s a good guy; he’s just had a lot of bad luck. He was in prison for something he didn’t do, while he was there his wife dies and he doesn’t even get to say goodbye to her and then he has to raise this boy alone. He’s also having trouble finding a job because he just got out of jail – so he has reason to be less than optimistic about life. By the end you’re most certainly rooting for him one way or another but you know… I don’t want to ruin it.
MB: So, does the book stay in this town? It discusses other areas around the globe but does it transfer over to the other side or…?
MA: No, the only kind of glimpses from the other side that we get is from the voices that we hear. It very much takes place here on earth, it’s not like my earlier book The Five People you Meet in Heaven where that all takes place is heaven. In fact, as the reader, you don’t know if these calls are real. They sound real and they’re having discussions. But no you’re in the town the entire time. The only time the book ever deviates away from the town is when it goes into a bit of history of the creation of the telephone – which sort of parallels throughout the book. In my research I thought it was such a colorful story as I looked into it more and more I decided to make it a part of the book to give the reader something that they can say “I didn’t know that about the phone.” For example the reason that Alexander Graham Bell was not trying to invent a telephone, he was trying to help his wife who was deaf learn how to speak and it was a device that he was measuring vocal vibrations and seeing if he could travel them through a wire to move a stylus so it would actually write something. He just sort of stumbled onto the fact that if he put electricity into it than it could become something else. This was the birth of the telephone. It was made to actually help someone speak face-to-face but then it turned into the ultimate device that allows us to not speak face-to-face.
MB: How prevalent is the history of the phone in the book?
MA: It’s something that comes up maybe every 20-25 pages or so. It’s a thread that weaves throughout the book but I wouldn’t say it’s a major part of the book.
In your other books they all have religious undertones even though they’re not necessarily about religion. Would you consider The First Phone Call from Heaven religious? No. I’m not qualified to write religious books. A couple of books ago I wrote a book called Have a Little Faith which was a non-fiction book about a pastor and a rabbi, and that was a book about faith but it was not written from some sort of expert basis, it was more of a reporting basis. But I don’t really have strong religious dogma in any of my books. I have themes of belief and hope and the important things in life which are all things that are closely tied with faith. People see the word heaven and they think “well it must be religious” but it really isn’t. I’m not a theologian; I didn’t go to divinity school or anything like that, so I couldn’t begin to write a book that is based in faith. A lot of my books get adopted and embraced by different faiths because they talk about hope and love being the most important things and giving to others and sharing your life with others.
MB: Does the book focus on churches or people of all faith?
MA: All faith, it’s not a church, it’s the whole world. Everyone in the world by the end has heard of this town and has an opinion one way or another.
MB:So do the people on the other side talk about what it’s like on the other side?
MA: No, they are very short conversations. They say they’re OK and they describe heaven a little bit and how they feel. They are a little mystical and vague and they are not always clear and normally end abruptly. For example at one point there is a soldier that says to his child “tell mom not to cry, if you knew what comes next you’d never worry about anything.” They aren’t staying on the phone for hours talking about new rides at cedar point.
MB: There have been a lot of books about angels visiting or talking through mediums, why did you ultimately decide to use the phone? Did that have to do with what you mentioned earlier about the invention of the phone?
MA: No, first of all this isn’t like any of those books, I’m somewhat familiar with what you’re talking about; it’s not that, you really just have to read it. It’s a thriller, a bit of a mystery and very realistic. It’s not written from a dogma point of view, it’s a real story. You’re trying to figure out if it’s real or not. Without ruining the ending, it’s all explained once you get to the end. It’s a story that takes place in our time in a symbolic town in Midwest America. I didn’t want people seeing ghost or spirits coming back, I just wanted them to hear the voices. To a larger point we live in a world where telephones are used for anything but talking. We hardly use them to speak to anybody anymore. We’re becoming more and more disconnected. We’re sending more and more text, more Facebook post, more group emails, and Instagram… it’s just sending pictures saying “look here I am.” We’re stopping talking to one another, so I thought it was interesting to use the phone to try to illustrate that this device that is separating us in the book actually becomes this conduit to the other side. Some of that comes from a lesson my mother taught me years ago when I wanted to get her a small computer so she could email me. She was totally computer illiterate, never wanted to use one or learned how to. She said “I’m never going to do that, if I do that you’ll stop calling me, I don’t want to read it, I can’t tell if anything is wrong with you by reading your messages. But I can tell if you call me when I hear your voice even if you say everything’s alright I’ll know if something is wrong.” And she was right. You call a lot of young people today and nobody answers… you text and you get an answer in 3 seconds.
MB: Anything else you wanted to say about the book?
MA: I look forward to seeing everybody in Toledo. We always have a really good reception and usually when I come I end up staying for a long time those nights to get those Christmas presents taken care of and that’s what I’ll do this time. I won’t leave until everybody’s book is signed, I don’t care how many people are there or how long it takes – I remember being in Toledo one time almost until midnight on one of these signings.
MB:One more question that I have to ask… Who is the sixth person you meet in heaven?
MA: [Ha, ha] You’ll have to wait for the next book.
12/03/2013 – 8:00pm – 10:00pm
Franklin Park
4940 Monroe Street
Toledo, OH 43623
