B (2:19)

Thank you.

A (2:20)

It was really, really good. Why don't you tell everybody what Twice is about?

B (2:24)

So Twice is a novel about a guy named Alfie who discovers when he's a young boy that he has the magical ability to do everything in his life twice if he wants to. The kicker is that he has to live with the consequences of his second try. So if the second try is worse than the first, too bad he's stuck with it. And he goes through his early life, kind of correcting his mistakes. And making the shot in the basketball game that he missed the first time. And fixing his little embarrassments with girls and things. And then when he becomes a man, he discovers there's one caveat to his power. It doesn't work with love. In fact, it actually works the opposite. That if you have someone who loves you. And you decide to go back and try somebody else or do a second try, that person. The first person can never love you again the same way. I mean, they'll be in the world and everything. But they just can't love you again. And so, of course, he meets this perfect woman. And they have this great relationship. Until they reach a point where something happens and he gets tempted and he has to make this decision. I'm not gonna tell you what happens. Cause then you won't bother to read the book. But it's very much a kind of magical realism book. About the grass always being greener on the other side. Particularly when it comes to love.

A (3:44)

And how did you think of this.

B (3:45)

Idea in the shower? I don't know, Zippy. The truth is that I get asked that a lot. Ever since Tuesdays with Maury, you know, which. If anybody read that book, it kind of breaks down to, like, each chapter is, we talk about this, we talk about that, we talk about this. And I think my brain has always sort of gone to, like, sliced bread kind of topics. And so when I decide what I want to do a book. I don't really decide on a character or a plot. It's a theme, one of those slices of a theme. So, like, the five people you meet in heaven, everybody thinks I had some idea about heaven. But I really was trying to write a book about people who don't think their life matters. And I said, all right. You know, that's something that everybody can relate to. Everybody matters, but a lot of people think they don't. How can I come up with a story that shows that? And I then invented a story about a guy who goes to heaven and meets five people. And finds out that all these people he touched in his life, he affected. Even though he thought he didn't matter. And it's kind of the same thing. So I. The theme for me was, in my mind was, well, you know, people are always thinking. And particularly as you get older, you're not old yet. But when you get old, you start to think, if I had done things differently, how would my life have turned out? When you're younger, if you want to do something different, you do it. You know, if you're working in the music business and then you decide you want to be in the accounting business, you quit and you go. But when you're later in life, it becomes like a regret, like, oh, I should have done this, but now I can't. And we start to imagine these lives that we could have had if we had only done this or only done that. So that was the theme that I wanted to write about. And then I just kind of invented all the rest of it.

A (5:28)

Wow. And you also contrast Alfie's story with Vincent Laporta, who is a detective, because there is a crime and you have to figure out who committed the crime. So you introduce this element of suspense in a way, right? We're trying to figure it out the whole time. And he ends up becoming sort of a part of the story as well. Talk about that device and just. I understand you just think of a story, but, well, there's a.

B (5:52)

There's a purpose to the madness. You know, most writers, I think if you really kind of dive down, they do it for a reason. So for me, I knew I was going to write a time travel story. And time travel stories are always fraught with danger because people start to try to take them apart. Well, wait a minute. If he goes there, then he can't do that. And you have to kind of do the same thing because you're like, well, what are the rules? Like, for example, for Alfie, if he goes back two weeks because he wants to try a chocolate ice cream cone or something like that, okay, so he gets to do that two weeks ago, but now what happens to him? He has to go. In my book, he has to go forward those two weeks. He has to relive them all over again. And he can't change the rest of the stuff. He can only change that one thing. So he has to constantly repeat his life over and over. At one point he says, I don't. I don't know how many lives I. How long I've been on Earth. Because if you took all the repeated days and years and months, it could be multiple lifetimes. So I knew that there would be questions and maybe even some eye rolls about like, oh, come on, that couldn't happen. So rather than letting the reader do that, I invented this scenario where Alfie gets arrested at the beginning of the book. He's older, and he gets arrested on suspicion of cheating a casino out of $2 million by winning three straight roulette numbers, which nobody can ever do. I looked it up. It's impossible, you know, and even one, the odds of getting an actual, you know, not red or green, but like 36 black or whatever it is, he just does it three times in a row so they suspect he must be cheating. And then he wires the money to Africa. And so that's very suspicious. So now I have him and the detective, and that's how it sets up. And while the reader may say, well, what's going on? Like you did with the crime? Did he really steal $2 million? And wait, he says he has this power. So probably. He probably went back and changed the numbers. Really, what I was doing was I invented a character who, as he tells his story about his life as a kid and growing up and changing all these, it breaks back into the interrogation. And the detective goes, wait a minute, hold on, Come on. And so the detective is the reader. And so I beat you to the punch because I allow him to ask all those questions. And it becomes part of the plot instead of just exposition or something like that. So, you know, sometimes you actually have a purpose for these little inventions. And that was mine.

A (8:16)

So one of the things that happens to Alfie early on is that he loses his mother. And this becomes a big theme throughout the book, something that he is constantly referring to and thinking about and informs everything. Can you talk a little bit about that?

B (8:29)

Yeah, I think, you know, as the writer of Tuesdays with Maury, I have met, honestly, thousands and thousands of people who talk to me about grief and regret. And the one most common one is, you know, if I had known that this person that I loved, my mother, my wife, my child, was going to die, I would have done something differently. And so Alfie discovers that he has this power when he's 8 years old and his mother dies. They're in Africa. They're missionaries. He's the child of a missionary. She gets bitten by a bug and catches a disease. And he goes to sit with her and she's asleep. And being eight years old, he decides, well, she's asleep. You know, my dad told me to sit with her, but she's asleep. I'm going to go outside and play. And when he comes back, she has died. And he's so racked with guilt that he wasn't there, whatever, that he goes to bed thinking, if only I could do this day again. And sure enough, the next morning, he wakes up and it's the previous day. And his father says, go sit with your mother. And he says, what do you mean? You know, just go sit with your mother. And he doesn't say she died because he can't even get the words out. And he goes down the hall, and sure enough, his mother is in bed again. And this was that moment where I got to sort of imagine, well, what if you did get that moment again with the person that you lost? How would you do it differently? And of course, he's eight, so he really doesn't know how to handle it. And fortunately, his mother kind of picks up on what it is, and they have this beautiful little discussion because he says, are you going to die again? And she says, come here, baby. Let me tell you all the things I love about you, which is something that I do with my little girl. Now, that's a whole other story, but we're blessed to have a little baby girl now. And she gets to tell him just before she dies, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 things that she loves about him. And they're all small little things, but whatever. And he gets to have that for the rest of his life. And so I know that that's a discussion that I would have loved to have had with my mother, who had a stroke and lost the ability to speak. And, like, that was gone. And I couldn't talk to her anymore, you know, until she died. And I know that it's something that people. Readers would want to experience, so that's the catalyst for him discovering that he has this power.

A (10:52)

And then the 12 things she loves, you scatter those throughout the book, which is so beautiful, and helps him live and become a better person.

B (11:01)

Well, that's what moms do, right? They help us become better people.

A (11:06)

You've just touched the hearts of every mom in this audience. Got to use that on the road.

B (11:12)

Okay. Will you come with me?

A (11:13)

If you ask me the question, I'll just keep asking. It'll be a setup.

B (11:16)

Well, I keep. I met you in your apartment, so there. We have a relationship like that.

A (11:22)

Oh, my goodness. Okay. When you think about your own life, aside from your mother and that soulful wish to have had that moment, what are other moments that you would have said twice, too? And meanwhile, in the book, also, you should just add that you can't change when someone dies. That's the other rule. That they're gonna die. That is their time. So even if you go back in time, you can't affect that, right?

B (11:47)

Yeah, I thought that was important. Otherwise, you're Superman, you know, and he actually tries with a friend of his who dies in the military, and he tries to go back and Changes his trajectory and sure enough, keeps him from going on a job in the military. And he thinks he's figured it out, and instead he dies at the same time. He would have anyhow. So, Zibby, I know I'm going to get that question a lot as we're talking. The book hasn't even come out yet, and I've already gotten the question a bunch of times. You know, what would you do? Or would you do anything twice in your life?

A (12:21)

I hate it when I ask questions that everyone's going to ask.

B (12:23)

Well, that's all right. That means the questions that everybody thinks about, why would you hate that? That's what I mean, you know, if we got five minutes with God, we'd probably all ask the same. Same question, too. I don't think God would get ticked off. You know.

A (12:37)

I like being compared to God. Okay, let's keep going.

B (12:39)

Yeah. Another question about what's the meaning of life really, you know? So my answer is this. I could give you 20. Cause a lot of people seem to think, I don't know, they have some vision of me because I wrote Tuesdays with more others, that somehow I have this Zen thing about my life that I. Oh, I wouldn't touch it. No, I would change, like, 50 things, and I could didactically run them off for you right now. But if you said to me, okay, by changing those things, you will not have learned the lesson that you learned from making the mistake, then I wouldn't change any of it. Because every mistake that I made formed me for the next thing that I did and ultimately contributed to who I became and kept me ultimately from making those same mistakes again. There's a line in the book I always think that authors. This would be the question. If I was sitting in your seat and I was interviewing authors, I would ask them, what's the one line in the book that sums up the whole book? And you'd be surprised that there's a hidden key in everybody's book, at least the authors that I know. But readers don't often pick up on it because to them, it's just another line in the book. But for the author, it's like the fulcrum and the thing that everything went through. So in this particular book, Alfie, he finds out about his power from his grandmother, who he discovers late in life that she has the same power that he does. And it's something that kind of appears in their family. And so he starts peppering her with questions because it's like, you know, okay, and he keeps asking her, how come we only get to do things twice? How come we only get to do things twice? And she kind of doesn't want to answer him and keeps saying, do you have a cigarette? I want to smoke and stuff like that. And he finally says, you know, why do we only get to do things twice? And she looks at him and she says, alfie, if you kept getting second chances, you'd never learn a damn thing. And that's the sentence through which everything in the book kind of travels. And it's the answer to your question is, you know, we all want second chances. We all want to get it to do it over again, but we don't realize that if we undid what we did, we wouldn't have know what we know now and we wouldn't learn anything. So that mystery and allure of a second chance isn't all it's cracked up to be. And the book is rife with examples of that. So my answer is, yeah, if you want me to start listing I should have done this and I should have done that and could have done this, I could have done that. Yeah, I can do all that, but not if it means that I don't learn from all the things I did wrong.

A (15:25)

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B (20:44)

Please don't, because I've already given away three quarters of the book.

A (20:52)

So do we want this gift or not? Is this a good thing for Alfie or not?

B (20:58)

I'm going to let people decide that by reading it because that really is sort of the question of the book, you know. And without giving away, you know, the most critical part of it, I'll just say he has to learn that lesson. He pays, he pays a very steep price for this. And that was one of the fun things about having him sort of tell the story to the detective. If you ever saw like a Slumdog Millionaire, for example, which I thought was a great example of, you know, he's being in investigated for this supposed crime of cheating on a game show. But through his explanation of why he's innocent, you find out how he knew the answers to all the, to the questions. It's a similar kind of device, you know, a grizzled cop who's kind of weary and world weary. He's always catching casino cheats. And now here's a guy, you know, who comes along with like this magical crazy story and he sort of is interested in it because it's not boring, you know, it's not the same old, you know, I didn't do it, I never did. He says, well, you know, if you really want to know what happened to me. And he takes out a notebook and he makes him read it and then he ends up having to read it himself. And it's the story of his life that he was going to give to somebody, you know, before he died. And so having that other person ask all those questions, Alfie gets to sort of say, this is the price that I paid for my gift. And the cop being the reader, says, man, you really feel sorry for yourself, don't you? You know, and all those kind of cynical responses to it. So it never gets to self pitying because you always have this cop or detective who goes, I gotta tell you, for a guy who gets to do things twice, you sure as hell make a lot of mistakes, you know, so that character was the most fun. And when they make a, they're actually doing a movie about it. To me, like that is the, that's the role that you want to play, you know, because you're a cynic.

A (23:00)

Wait, tell us about the movie. That's so great.

B (23:03)

Yeah, for the first time in my writing career the book was like chased after before it came out and there was a big bidding thing and so Netflix won it and they've already got a writer, Paul Weitz, who is really great. I've met him multiple times now. He wrote about and directed about a boy. You remember that film with Hugh Grant and many other films. And he like when the first time I met him he had this book was underlined, it was the galley, you know, it wasn't, the book wasn't out yet and it was, he had every line and he went through all these things and I said, well, you know it better than I do, so go ahead. And so he's already writing it and putting it together and he agreed that, you know, whoever gets to play the detective, that's the role you want because you know, you're the fulcrum of all this story. And then of course you have to cast Alfie and Gianna as the woman of his dreams. And that's one of those. I think they're doing it on the Internet now. Who do you want to play? This one and that one.

A (24:04)

You know, I know you picked your favorite line in the book, but I want to nominate a second choice. A second, you know, a backup line. Our best choices often come when we have no choice.

B (24:17)

Yeah.

A (24:18)

All right, tell me about that.

B (24:19)

Do you believe that? Yes, I do. I have faced many decisions in my life that I felt, you know, boxed in and didn't want to have to deal with, but had no choice. Many of them have to do with this orphanage I operate in Haiti, which you and I have talked about and Chica came from. And, you know, I've been there for 16 years now, go every month and have had well over 100 kids come through, and many of them now are up here in college, and many of them have been very sick and extremely impoverished. And I've had to make a lot of decisions that you have no choice, and you want to look at the sky and go, how can I be in this position? But sometimes, as I say, you make the best decisions when you don't have an option. One of the things that haunts us is like, I could do this, I could do that. I could do this, I could do that. And we torture ourselves over what we could do. Sometimes it's like, I just have to do this, and I have no choice. You know, I have to get this. We had a kid that he had a hole in his esophagus, and everything he was trying to eat was going into his lungs. And so he couldn't eat, he couldn't drink, he couldn't do anything. And we tried to get him to the one doctor there that supposedly did this. And they left him in the hallway of this hospital for six days. And finally I just said, you know, it was like, well, do you wait? Do we wait? Not wait. I said to my director, who was up there with them, get him out. And we're putting them on a plane. We're getting them here. I don't care what it takes. And he said, well, they won't let him leave. I said, you take them, you put them in a car and you get them out. You don't ask them. You just go, and I'm going to get in a plane and we're going to get him out of here. And sure enough, you know, he did that. We flew him to the States. They didn't have a single feeding tube in all of Haiti that didn't go down your throat. And of Course, he can't eat if it goes down your throat, because that's the problem that he had. Now, we have stomach feeding tubes, but they don't have them there. Literally, when we landed in the United States, it was just a couple days before Christmas at the airport when I was there, the ambulance. They put a feeding tube in him in the ambulance. I mean, he was days away from dying, hours even. And you look at that, you look back on that and you go, boy, if I had just sat there longer and contemplated, he could have died, you know? And so, I mean, that's just one episode. I can tell you a bunch more. So I've seen what it's like when you have no choice. And sometimes, you know, it's not a decision tree anymore. It's, I'm doing this, and then I'm going to do this and I'm going to do this, and you don't think about all the other possibilities. That is true. Sometimes the best choices come when we have no choice.

A (27:13)

Wow. So a lot of your books, and in a way, obviously this book as well, really focus on loss and what we do with loss and how we get through it and what loss teaches us. What is your takeaway on that?

B (27:28)

Boy, you know, I've really dealt Zibby with that question now for, you know, almost 30 years, since Tuesdays with Maury. You know, I. I can tell you that one of my favorite quotes that I've learned over time on this is one that says, the only whole heart is a broken heart. And I do believe that that's true. I don't think that we can love the way that we. Sorry. To make something that was either gas or a reaction to something I said. I do think you have to go through heartbreak in order to really love. I think you have to go through loss in order to really appreciate. And in Stranger in the Lifeboat, which I wrote, a lot of people, again, you know, like we talk about, what's your motivation? Everybody thinks I wanted to write a book about 10 people on a lifeboat who think that they're about to die. And then they pull a guy in who says he's God and they don't believe him. That wasn't it at all. I wanted to write a book about help and how sometimes help is right in front of us and we don't realize it. And there's a line in that book where the protagonist is talking about his wife dying to God. The character plays God and he says, you know, why did you take my wife from me and God Says, why is it that when you have loss, you always talk about what I've taken from you? Why is it that you never talk about what I've given you? And that was in a direct response to the loss of our daughter, our little girl, chica, who had died. And my initial reaction when she died at seven was, you know, why did you take her? But over the years, I've come to understand that, you know, I should have been asking, what. What did we do right, that we were giving her for that period of time? You know? And so that's what I. I try to look at loss that way, and I try to tell people who ask me to look at it that way too. You look at what you have, you know, oh, my mother died, and it's so terrible. How old was. She was 87. You had your mother on this earth for 87 years. You know, think about if you had lost her 20 years earlier, you know, so what gave you those extra 20 years? You know, what did you do to deserve that? And when you start thinking about it humbly like that, you realize that most everything we have in life is a gift. And when everything is a gift, then even when you lose it, you can just think of it as well. But I was lucky to have it for the time I had it. And that's a much better way to go through it than to just lament all the things you don't have in your life anymore. That's what I've learned.

A (30:09)

My gosh. Thank you, Mitch. Thank you for all of this advice. Thank you for Twice, which we will all read twice. It's amazing.

B (30:18)

Thank you.

A (30:19)

Thank you for listening to Totally Booked with Siby, formerly Moms don't have time to read books. If you loved the show, tell a friend, leave a review. Follow me on Instagram iippyowens and spread the word. Thanks so much. Oh, and buy the books. Ready to order? Yes. We're earning unlimited 3% cash back on dining and entertainment with a Capital One Saver Card. So let's just get one of everything.

B (30:49)

Everything.

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B (31:52)

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