00:00Can you summarize the book in a few sentences so they know?
00:03Yeah, it's twice is the story of a guy named Alfie, who discovers when he's a kid that he has
00:09the magical ability to do everything in his life twice. But the kicker is he has to live with the
00:15consequences of the second try. He can't go back and try again and again and again. So whatever
00:20happens the second time, that's it. And he goes through his life, you know, mostly fixing his
00:25embarrassing childhood mistakes and teenage embarrassments. And then when he becomes a
00:30man and falls in love, he discovers the one caveat to the power is that it doesn't work with love.
00:35In fact, it kind of works in the reverse. If you should change your mind with someone who's in
00:41love with you and maybe go and try somebody else, then that person can never love you again.
00:45And at a very critical moment in his life, he has to make a very consequential choice about his love
00:53life and second chances. So I'm just curious, like how much of Alfie, because of his musical
00:58backstory, is you in a way? Most of the embarrassments that Alfie goes through are mine.
01:06I didn't have to make up too many of those. There was a moment where I tried to talk to a girl I had
01:12a crush on in junior high school and knocked a glass of milk into her lap. And all I could think of to
01:20say was, look at that, and then walked away. And I thought, well, I can't make that up any better.
01:26So I just threw that in a book. And there was an embarrassing makeout party when I was in fifth or
01:31sixth grade, where we all went into the closets. And, you know, we sat there for six or seven minutes.
01:38And I tried to kiss. The girl and I were trying to kiss, but it was so dark that I just banged my
01:46head against her head. And she said, ow. And that was the prelude to my first kiss.
01:53So a lot of the embarrassments that Alfie had were mine. The slicker stuff that he does later
02:00was fiction.
02:02So you are no stranger to like magical realism. The romance aspect, you are newer to, right?
02:09You've written a love story. Tuesdays with Maury is a love story. But in this romantic way,
02:14is this, why did you want to do that now?
02:16Well, I think, honestly, Lindsay, like I tend to write thematically more than plot wise. I always
02:25sort of think of what the theme is that I want to do first. And then I create a story about it.
02:30Tuesdays with Maury obviously was a true story. And I was just trying to tell what happened. But
02:35the way that Tuesdays with Maury breaks down every week is kind of a different subject that
02:40we discuss. That's sort of how my writing career has gone after Tuesdays with Maury. You know,
02:46I guess maybe I sort of think like that. And so the five people you meet in heaven, for example,
02:51I didn't set out to write a story about five people you meet in heaven. I set out to write a
02:55story about people who don't matter, who think they don't matter, and who think that they're
02:59nobodies and whatever. And I wanted to show there's no such thing as a nobody. Everybody
03:03touches somebody, everybody affects somebody. That was my theme. And then I said, what can
03:08I come up with to, you know, illustrate that theme? And I ended up inventing a guy who goes
03:14to heaven, meets five people and finds out that how much his life mattered. Same thing
03:19with Stranger in the Lightboat, for example, a couple books ago, I wanted to write a book about
03:23help, you know, and how we were always asking for help, but yet sometimes helps right in front of
03:29us, and we don't take it, you know. And so then I came up with the idea of people in a lifeboat who
03:35were screaming to stay alive. And then somebody who thinks he says he's God, washes into the boat,
03:41and they don't believe that he's God, you know. So it's more that and with this book, I wanted to
03:47write about love. You know, I've written, I've had love stories within my books. Five People in
03:53Heaven has a wonderful love story, and The Little Liar has a wonderful love story, and a lot of the
03:58books have love stories within them, you know. But I wanted the book to be about love and the way we
04:06don't always appreciate it when we have it, and how you come to appreciate it as you get older.
04:14So it was really that. It was really like I wanted to write a story about love, and then I came up with
04:20the device to tell it. Do you read a lot of romance books? No, no. And I didn't read a lot of them
04:27before this either, because I know that it's a big genre now, and I didn't want to sort of
04:36fall into, you know, oh, it's another one in that genre, you know. I wanted to bring something
04:43hopefully fresh to it, so I thought it would be better if I stayed away from reading that. I just
04:49sort of, it's my stab at a romance story, and whether it's any good or not, you know, everyone
04:58else will decide. If you had, you have a whole day to read, what is your perfect setting? Where are you?
05:05Oh. What are you doing? There's got to be water somewhere, either a river, a brook, an ocean,
05:14so it sets that kind of background noise that blocks out everything else, and it's outside,
05:23you know, somewhere outside, and something, and some kind of, and this they have to invent,
05:29some kind of thing to sit in that your back doesn't, after a certain amount of time, go,
05:36okay, that's enough, you know, because the one thing that stops me from reading all day long is
05:42usually my back, you know, of all things. It's not boredom. It's not my eyes. It's my back says,
05:48you know, we got to move. We got to get out, and then when you try to read when you're standing up,
05:52it's not the same thing, whatever, so some really comfortable chair or hammock or whatever,
05:57water in the background, and about 71 degrees.
06:06That sounds amazing. I also want that.
06:09Let me know if you find it.
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