Tuesdays with Morrie

I'm not an Oprah fan, but sometimes she can really hit the nail on the head with her book recommendations.

This weekend I read Tuesdays with Morrie, a memoir about an overly ambitious sports writer, Mitch Albom, who learns how to live life to the fullest when he goes to visit his old college professor, Morrie Schwartz, who is dying of Lou Gehrig's disease. After the fist visit, Mitch starts coming back every Tuesday, and spends the day listening to Morrie's advice on life, death, and all the other stuff.

Normally, I don't go for inspirational type reading - I'm much more likely to be seen toting a copy of something by Kurt Vonnegut or J.D. Salinger - and I would never have picked up Tuesdays with Morrie if I hadn't had to do so for a class I'm taking, but I'm glad I did. Against my will, the more I read this book the more my cynicism melted away to be replaced by cautious optimism about the ability of even the jerkiest person to positively affect someone else.

I think what really made me like this book was the fact that what's in it really happened. A lot of memoirs give representations of actual events that have been changed to replace the inadequacies of the author's memories or to make the story flow well. Usually when you read an autobiographical work, the dialogue isn't made up of verbatim quotations of what was actually said - no one has that good a memory. But Tuesdays with Morrie is based on taped conversations between Morrie and Mitch, so a good bit of Morrie's message in the book is written exactly as Morrie said it.

It's as if Mitch was taking dictation for Morrie in the way Milton's daughters wrote for him after he lost his vision - only Mitch is allowed a voice, and his story adds meaning to Morrie's words.

What makes this book better than the average touchy-feely "inspirational" junk is not just Morrie's message about refusing to let the culture get in the way of your life, but the way that it was captured, all recorded on tape by a writer who was very different from his subject, presented, for the most part, chronologically - almost like a slide show of Morrie's last Tuesdays on earth.

- Jennifer Jacob
jjacob@themeridianstar.com