You might have heard the joke about the businessman who went to heaven and said, 'If only I could have fitted in more meetings.'

"It just doesn't happen that way does it? And yet we're all living that way, " he laughs when he hears the joke. He got wise earlier than his death - gave it all up to do something he really cared about. The irony is his opting out has made him an international household name rather than a Stateside one.

Mitch Albom was a successful sports writer and commentator; he had tickets to the best games and money to burn. He was dead to himself. Then he saw his old tutor on television. A man who was dying and had never been dead to himself. He contacted the lecturer whose name was Morrie, but he had called him coach. Albom met Morrie for 19 Tuesdays before he died of Lou Gehrig's disease, a kind of muscular paralysis which chokes the sufferer to death. The wasting illness left the mind and spirit intact. Morrie's simple edicts, his inconspicuous, self-chosen life, have now had a direct effect on millions of people worldwide.

Morrie spoke to them after his death, because Albom taped, transcribed and edited their conversations into a book. The ancient relationship between Socrates and Plato was reborn. In reading Tuesdays with Morrie, people found the courage to be themselves.

The author among them. Albom just can't stop being himself. Publishers have a love-hate relationship with him. He won't buy into success because that's not why he does what he does.

"I don't produce books on a schedule. I write them when I think I have something to say. It was six years between books one and two. Three years between books two and three. Most authors put one out every year. That's not me. I don't have a book planned. They're going to a make film out of this and I will write the screenplay. You'll control your work and what you want to say about it better that way. Jeff Daniels, who starred in the last one with Jon Voight, I know him well, I've written plays for his theatre. All Michigan guys know one another.

You know Jack Lemmon's last film was Tuesdays?"

There are people who name drop and people who really know the people they are talking about.

Albom belongs to the latter group. He has no interest in them as anyone other than people and their ability to translate his characters onto screen.

A-listers sign up to star in adaptations of his work.

He himself could be an A-lister. And won't be.

His wealth is distributed and you only have to meet him to believe that. He is less interested in the money the new life has brought, than the release, which for him is priceless. The magic of Morrie's wisdom and common sense worked for his scribe.

Here's a bit of everyday magic, brought about by reading For One More Day, his latest book and second work of fiction. I've reviewed hundreds of books. None of them have made me call my mother up to tell her I loved her. This one did.

The storyline is of a down-and-out former baseball player whose decision to commit suicide is intercepted by the appearance of his mother. She prevents him killing himself for more than one reason - the most pertinent being she has been dead for 10 years.

My very much alive mother happened to be at the train station I was pulling into when I phoned her, having just finished the book on my way to the interview. On the spur of the moment she travelled with me into the Merrion Hotel. I don't normally take my mother to work with me.

The softer side She met Mitch and his wife Janine - the woman who waited for the man she loved to grow up and considered herself 'blessed' that she did so. They are courteous, gentle, quiet-spoken people from Michigan, with an honesty that he showed once he began answering my questions.

Here is a man at the top of his game. The sports commentator turned life commentator whose books are translated the globe over and are made into films by Oprah Winfrey's film production company. He loves television's First Lady for her commitment and determination to produce quality work that is life affirming. Local heroes make as much impression as global ones: "Lots of people do good work on small scales that have a huge and lasting impression on lives."

Morrie spoke when he was close to the grave and his scribe's subsequent fiction has dealt with characters in the near-death experience - merging heaven with earth: "I write about that place to get the reader in touch with the softer side of themselves. If I try to persuade people that every day we touch another person's life and change it, which is the truth, then it is easier to have a character on the other side of the curtain saying that.

"A lot of the stories in For One More Day are stories from my own childhood. There's a story about a librarian refusing to let a child take Jules Verne's book, Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea, out because he was too young. It happened to me and my mother ran into the librarian, enraged, and said I was never to do that to her son again. But she also ruined my life by dressing me up in a mummy costume for a party."

Other people's kids went along with stetsons, holsters and check shirts, to be an average cowboy - Mitch's mother put imagination and work into his apparel. "I got around to saying thank you. . ."

He also remembers two of his neighbours spying with binoculars on a divorcée. "Back then a divorcée was stigmatised. She lived across the street from us and the whole place made fun of her and her little boy. I remember thinking this was so wrong." Now that the opposite is the case, with onein-two marriages ending in divorce, he is just as concerned as when he saw a divorcée vilified.

"Without going into too much detail, and it's not for want of trying, but Janine and I don't have children. We both love them and would have loved our own. We married late and it's not like they told us in high school, that all we would have to do is look at each other and we would have a baby. We've been blessed with 15 nieces and nephews . . . If you were to come to our house you would say, 'What do you mean you don't have kids?' . . . We have a big yard and stuff in the house to help them feel like it's a second home.

"Part of this book is a response to what divorce does to children. All but two of my nieces and nephews have witnessed divorce once, some twice, and some even three times. My wife and I have observed the longing that these kids have. They often defend the parent who has been a jerk, mostly the father. They take anger out on the parent who stayed to care. It's hard to watch the children trying to be part of the mother's world, then the father's world, travelling to and from, having two lives when they have trouble enough dealing with one life." He leaves it at that. One thing he has learned from his old teacher is not to pontificate.

"When I went to Morrie on Tuesdays he never held forth, he waited until I asked the question."

It's 12 years since Morrie talked to him - what would he say to someone who came along to him, with a tape recorder, if he himself was dying?

"What I would want to say would be similar to Morrie, but ingested to my own experience. Almost everything in modern life conspires to lead you away from the very things you ought to be spending time on. It's a daily fight to remember, while you are healthy, what you are going to realise when you are not healthy. I am lucky because I spend so much time with sick people. If I do an event with 200 people, 150 of those will come up to me and tell me about someone who died. At least a few of those will be dying themselves. Consequently I never go too long without being reminded of the frailty of human life. I don't go a week without thinking of my own mortality."

Family ties His life before Tuesdays and his life after it are what he describes as "two different lives lived by two different people". The only similarity is that the old Mitch and new Mitch travelled a lot and are married to Janine. "Before that book the hardest question I ever got asked, and I was mostly asked in airports since I travel so much, was 'who is going to win the Super Bowl?' I could answer it and keep walking. But a few weeks ago I was at a boarding gate and a man came up to me and said, 'My brother was dying and the last thing we did was read your book together.'" He was reminded, in talking to this man, about the emotional distance - a male distance - that existed between himself and his brother while his brother dealt with cancer. It wouldn't happen now. Mitch has more to do with his family than he has to do with anyone else.

"Well now I can't walk on, can I? I have to stop, share, really hear the story. When I do, I realise that almost everything that I have spent the majority of my previous days doing - being on the phone with the publisher, talking to a newspaper, writing a script, being a certain way because the culture tells me to be this way, none of it would matter, if I got sick myself. If I knew I was going to die."

This realisation is one he thinks of as a blessing and a curse: "A blessing because I've been able to change my life around. If I were to die next week I would be happy - I spent three hours talking to my wife yesterday. My nieces and nephews have been over all the time. It's a curse because you are constantly at odds with what is going on in America on a daily basis.

"It's exhausting. For example, the reality-television phenomenon gets to me. We devote pages of newspaper coverage - hours of talk time - to these shows. A voice in my head says: 'Are we nuts?

Giving so much of our precious time away on something that doesn't mean anything, concocted to raise advertising for corporations?'

"It's a desire to find something that is more interesting than your own life. What we should be doing is making our own life more interesting.

"To walk around thinking like I do, in America, is to bite your tongue until it bleeds."

Has he lost his friends as a result of his rethink and reshape of his existence? "I've changed friends."

Millions of books later, his existence could be charmed - in the way of being a celebrity and going to glittering events. He would rather stay at home, not watching television, "I own lots of televisions, I just don't watch them often. I always have something better to do.

"That's why my friends are those who are doing something to help themselves and their world.

They enjoy life more fully. I look inward - to my family. I have a small group of people. I can't get enough time with the people I really care about. It doesn't matter that I only saw them yesterday. I want to see them again today. This is why I love Christmas. For Thanksgiving we had 50 people over, some in the house and some in a hotel nearby. The family are scattered all over America and Europe. Every day they just came over in the morning and we sat, talked, ate all day long. Four straight days in a row and when they all left on the Sunday both Janine and I said: 'Why did they have to go?' I can't seem to get enough of that stuff anymore and I wasn't always like that. I used to be like: 'Time for them to go so I can get back to work.'" We are living lives with Do Not Disturb signs.

Mitch Albom knows, he spends a lot of time in hotels. "In my country we worship success. Fame is now more important than money."

Ironically now he is more famous than when he was a coast-to-coast broadcaster. Is this hard for him? "No, honestly, no. I am talking all the time about something real. The only time I find it exhausting is when people make assumptions about me. I am naturally a shy person. When people greet me by my first name it helps me. In Michigan they say 'Hey Mitch'. I don't feel it's intrusive. It reminds me that this is what it must have been like when we lived in a small village and everyone knew everyone else. That's how we are supposed to live. I wrote a column introducing my readers to my neighbours. I told them who everyone was and, at the end, I revealed those are my neighbours when I was 10 years old. I don't know my neighbours now - even the ones next door."

When the piece came out his neighbours didn't call around. "And I didn't either, because I am shy. So I'm no better than they are."

Meeting Morrie in heaven In heaven Mitch Albom would like to meet Morrie and a few others. "I've written two books about it, but I am not haughty enough to surmise in any way what comes next. I just feel that life does not end here. I base that on hope, belief and the many near-death survivors I have met. They tend to come to my talks or read books. Not all their stories are about a white light. An awareness, calmness, peacefulness. They don't all follow the same pattern, but feelings are the same. I've met enough people who have gone and come back, not to dismiss it, but to believe in it. That suggests a soul to me.

I choose to believe in that.

"We don't end up in the ground eaten by maggots. There is something beyond this. Universal.

In a world predicated by difference - we are all the same underneath. Morrie taught me that."

If he had not met Morrie, who would he be?

"Divorced, probably. I would have had 12 more years on the path that I was on. A cynical journalist's path. There probably would have been no talking to me anyhow. I don't think this me would have been able to get through to that me.

"There is no question, I would be profoundly different - for the worse, not better. Marriage would have been too hard . . . I wouldn't have seen the value in family. I would be 10 times more cynical. If I read my books I would have had no use for them."

In sports journalism, you witness how cheap life and dreams can be - a snapped tendon, an awkward fall, can ruin lives. Mitch saw that once a week and thought no more of it than hey, that's life.

"People like I was then criticise me now. It's a very valuable thing in helping me deal with feelings the critics bring up in me. My critics are mostly cynics and say I'm too sentimental, upbeat, etc."

One review described it as another outpouring from the 'King of Positivity'. "They meant it cynically but I've decided - that's not bad. I've worked amongst them, still do, and was very much like them. I know the quiver from which they pull those arrows. I used to wear one. There are far worse things to be called. I don't need my work to be dark for it to be successful. I have written so far about Morrie, who was dying horribly, Eddie who thought his life was meaningless and now Chick who is an alcoholic ex-player. If the endings to their lives were positive, their conditions weren't."

Janine is one person who voluntarily saw him through the sea change: "I am married to a saint.

We have a lot in common. I knew deep down but I found out, properly, 12 years ago."

His second book is Five People You Meet in Heaven, here are his top two to get in touch with: "Morrie, desperately. So much has changed since I saw him last. I would like to ask if he feels I did a decent job while I was here. I wrote a book about him that he never read. It's this hollow part of me that wants to know what he thought. I never got to hand in my term paper to the professor.

"Then there's my uncle. He was a second father to me. He taught me how to drive and swim. I loved him. When he got sick he had two young sons and he was way too young. I took him to the hospital.

He was green and I knew by looking at him this was an important moment. But I had no idea how you were supposed to react. I just walked him down the hallway, led him to the elevator. He got in, the doors closed and I never saw him again. He died six hours later. I knew I should say something and I didn't. I want to meet him, say that I watched out for his kids. They grew up okay, got married, he's got grandchildren. I couldn't even cry when he died. I was caught up in the confusion, the guilt of what I should have done.

"About four or five months later, on a Saturday morning, I woke up and I think I had been dreaming about him and I burst into tears for an hour.

Never had it happened before or since."

He may not be aware of this. Mitch Albom turned into that uncle.