On Reading Twice

 I finished Mitch Albom's Twice a few days ago and I'm still carrying it around, the way you carry around a conversation you didn't get to finish with someone.

Albom has a trick he's used since Tuesdays with Morrie, where a small phrase gets repeated until it stops being a sentence and starts being a weight you hold. This time it's "suspicion and belief cannot share the same bed." I highlighted it the first time it showed up on page 73, half amused because it sounded like something a grandfather says at a wedding. By the time it comes back near the end, on page 147, it's not amusing anymore. It's the whole marriage, compressed.

I read fast, mostly at night, and I noticed I was highlighting two different kinds of lines. One kind is the aphorism, built to be underlined, the sort of line you can lift and put on a slide. "You can't go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending." That's the very first highlight in the book, on page 7, before the story even starts moving, and it tells you exactly what kind of book this is going to be. Albom writes sentences that want to be quoted. I don't hold that against him. It's a skill, even if it occasionally shows its seams.

The other kind of line is the one that got me more, and it's the kind nobody quotes. A goat bleating at noon in a village. A boy noticing his mother's hands. The detail about the mother, the recurring list of "things my mother said she loved about me," ticking upward through the book like a countdown that's actually a count-up. Your laugh. The way you remember every little thing that happened. The way you pray. By the time you reach eleven on that list, you're not reading about someone else's mother anymore.

The father and son scene near page 172 wrecked me a little. "I want to say how much I love you. And if anyone didn't do a good job, it was me." That's such an unremarkable way to say something enormous, and I think that's deliberate. The big regrets in this book don't arrive with music. They arrive while someone is driving, or right before someone has to leave a room.

The line that gives the book its title took me a while to sit with. You cannot get someone to love you twice, and love is the one thing you can't undo and redo, unlike almost everything else in a life where you get second attempts at your career, your health, your friendships. I kept thinking about how much of my own life runs on second chances, second cities, second drafts of a CV, second versions of a plan. Love apparently doesn't work that way. You get one run at it with a given person, and if you break it, the door doesn't reopen the same way twice, even if the person does come back.

What stayed with me longest wasn't a single line but the shape of the whole thing, a story about a man narrating his failures to someone he's lost, hoping that saying it all out loud in a notebook counts for something even though the person it's addressed to may never read it. There's something almost desperate and almost hopeful about that structure. Writing as penance. Writing as the only kind of second chance still available to you when the real one is gone.

I don't think Twice is Albom's tightest book. Some of the aphorisms do too much work and the plot machinery creaks in places. But the ending line, the one about true love waiting a lifetime, or two, is the kind of sentence that makes you forgive a book its creakier parts. I closed it and sat there for a minute before doing anything else, which is the only review that actually matters to me.