Success hasn’t gone to Mitch Albom’s head. It’s gone to his heart. Fifteen years ago, Albom was already the best-known sportswriter in Detroit, having worked his way into the majors by writing for Sports Illustrated and the Philadelphia Inquirer. He would go on to conquer other media as a radio talk show host, ESPN analyst, screenwriter and playwright.

Successful? Sure. But fulfilled? Not so much.

“I was sort of living neutrally; you’re not in reverse and you’re not in drive,” he says, choosing an apt Motor City metaphor. “If you would have asked my position on faith, I wouldn’t have said I was an atheist or agnostic; of course I believe in God and I was raised with the faith and that’s it. But if you drilled down a little further and asked how often do you go to service? Uh, once a year. How often do you get involved in anything having to do with your faith? Never. How often do you pick up a Bible and read through it? Never.”

In 1995, in quick succession, he married Janine Sabino and reconnected with Morrie Schwartz, his former college professor who was dying of Lou Gehrig’s disease. The life lessons learned from his dying mentor would form the basis for Tuesdays with Morrie, which spent an astounding four years on the New York Times bestseller list.

Morrie did more than catapult Mitch to fame and fortune (part of which he used to pay off Morrie’s medical bills). It also threw open deserted locker rooms in his heart.

“Tuesdays with Morrie kind of pushed me in the direction to begin examining a bigger picture of life than just making money and accomplishing things,” Albom admits in a telephone interview.

Following a couple of inspirational novels (The Five People You Meet in Heaven; For One More Day), Albom hits one out of the park once again with Have a Little Faith: A True Story, which grew from the author’s close encounters with two remarkable men of very different faiths.

Have a Little Faith opens with an unusual request. An aging Albert Lewis, who had been Albom’s rabbi growing up in suburban New Jersey, asks his successful congregant to write his eulogy. To do so properly, Albom must get to know the man behind the vestments, little knowing it would take eight years to prepare for the inevitable.

As Albom makes pilgrimages to “the Reb’s” suburban home for Morrie-like visits, he slowly grows to love and understand the man he had feared as a kid—a loving husband and father who suffered the loss of a daughter yet remained unshakable in his faith.

“When I knocked on his door the first time, he opened it and he was wearing Bermuda shorts and sandals. He just looked like a goofball! I didn’t think that was allowed! I thought he slept in a robe. Here he was, saying, come into my world, it’s not that strange.”

The rabbi helps reconnect the author with his faith through exchanges like this:

“But so many people wage wars in God’s name.
‘God,’ the Reb scolded, ‘does not want such killings to go on.’
Then why hasn’t it stopped?
He lifted his eyebrows.
‘Because man does.’ ”

Between Saturdays with Albert, Albom skillfully weaves in a second narrative about Henry Covington, whose journey through a hellish youth of poverty and drug addiction ultimate led him to establish the I Am My Brother’s Keeper ministry and homeless shelter in Detroit’s inner city.

When Albom drops by the church to write a feature story, he finds a ministry held together by faith and charity but little else. A gaping hole in the church roof ultimately forced the congregation to construct a makeshift tent of plastic sheeting in one corner to enable services to be held.

Covington’s courage and his congregation’s dedication nudged Albom to an ecumenical awakening.

“Before I started going through all this, I did not like it when other people started talking about their religion, especially if it wasn’t mine. I felt almost offended; don’t push what you believe on me, you know? And when people of my own faith talked about it, I was kind of embarrassed, too: don’t overdo this, don’t call attention to yourself. I felt uncomfortable in both directions,” he says.

“But I don’t anymore. I realized that you can be around people of faith and you don’t have to turn into a zombie. You don’t have to eat communion wafers or put on a yarmulke. It’s just one element of people’s lives and you can talk to them about it and celebrate it.”

Though Have a Little Faith was eight years in the making, Albom admits its message could not be more timely.

“I do think it’s fortuitous. When times get tough and money disappears and people get fired and the things you assumed were going to be there forever are not there, you start to drift back to something you once had and you wonder why you let it go in the first place,” he says.

Albom uses his success to power three charities: A Time to Heal, which focuses on community projects; The Dream Fund, which provides scholarships for underserved children; and S.A.Y. (Super All Year) Detroit, which serves the needs of the homeless.

But Albom refuses to take the credit, or to use his success to promote himself.

“My attitude, for better or worse since these books started to become what they’ve become, is I’m happy for them, I embrace them, but I don’t need to change who I am. I like who I am here. I don’t need to leave Detroit and go and try to elevate myself. I live in the same house, we have the same phone number and I have the same job as I did before Tuesdays with Morrie.”

Would he wish a little faith upon his hapless Detroit Lions?

“Yeah,” he chuckles, “along with a little defense.”

Jay MacDonald writes faithfully from Austin, Texas.

During the three years since the publication of Elizabeth Gilbert’s memoir Eat, Pray, Love, more than six million readers around the world have found resonance in her chronicle of personal discovery. This intensely driven writer learned to live in the moment in Italy (Eat), explored her spiritual self in India (Pray) and found her soul mate in Felipe, a Brazilian living in Bali (Love). The two planned to spend the rest of their lives together, but previous bad marriages made them determined to skip actual matrimony. Fate is capricious, however, and it intervened in 2006; because Felipe’s visits to the U.S. had been too frequent, he was banned from entering the country. If Felipe was ever to return, it could only be as Gilbert’s husband. This unexpected turn of events was the impetus for Gilbert’s new memoir, Committed.

“I was working on a novel about the Amazons,” says Gilbert, who was shocked by the sudden urgency of marriage. “I was well into its research and didn’t have any intention of writing another memoir. But when this came up, my spirits were so viral. I did not want to enter this union feeling about [marriage] the way I felt about it. I loved this guy way too much to enter into something so serious with such a profound sense of dread. Really, the most efficient way that I know to work through something is to write about it. And then, pretty quickly, as soon as the idea came to me, I realized this is a very interesting topic.”

“I left with a new respect for marriage, simply for no other reason than for its almost Darwinian survival.”

Which is why Committed is not only a memoir, it’s also a history of marriage through the ages and a social commentary on the institution. Gilbert even harks back to Plato’s Symposium and its discussion of soul mates: “Once upon a time . . . we humans did not look the way we look today. Instead, we each had two heads and four legs and four arms—a perfect melding, in other words, of two people joined together, seamlessly united into one being. . . . Since we each had the perfect partner sewn into the very fabric of our being, we were all happy.”

But in our happiness we neglected the gods, so Zeus punished mankind by tearing us apart, forcing us to spend the rest of our lives looking for the vanished half, our other soul. “This is the singular fantasy of human intimacy: that one plus one will somehow, someday, equal one,” Gilbert writes.

Speaking from the home she and Felipe now share in Frenchtown, New Jersey (dishes clattering in the sink and her dog barking occasionally), Gilbert elaborates on Plato’s concept.

“It is the most beautifully put metaphor. That along with Schopenhauer’s porcupine tells you pretty much all you need to know about intimacy. You just put those two things together, the urge to merge combined with the reality of how prickly it almost always is, negotiating your space versus somebody else’s space.”

Gilbert muses on the reasons people marry, many of which in this country, she believes, have nothing to do with true commitment.

It’s important that “we know the difference between the desire to get married and the desire to have a really great party,” she says with a laugh. “Especially when we are young, those two things can blur and you spend a great deal more time planning the party than you do planning the marriage.”

She contrasts this with a couple she knew growing up, the Websters, who married because he, as a farmer, needed a wife and she, as a woman, needed a provider. Love, passionate or otherwise, had nothing to do with the decision. For years they worked their farm, raised their family, shared good times and bad. When her health declined, Mr. Webster took over care of his wife, bathing her, feeding her, seeing to her needs until her death—not the actions of a person devoid of love for his spouse.

“We, having elevated the idea of romance and infatuation to such a high state, feel like the happiest day of your life should be the day you get married. That in itself should be the pinnacle. What the Websters probably knew, even to such an extent that they certainly never defined it, never even had to say it, because they just knew it, was that where a marriage begins is not nearly as important as where it ends up. You can begin from a place of great pragmatism and then over the years grow into a very deep, wordless affection and loyalty, which I found very moving to remember.”

Thinking about the Websters, Gilbert adds, “Felipe has this very specific word called bate pape that means ‘chit chat.’ It’s his favorite word for what the whole purpose of intimacy is. He said when he was a kid, his favorite memories of childhood were lying in bed, listening to his parents chit chat, make bate pape. And that’s where their intimacy was based. It wasn’t necessarily in high-flung sexual passion, although it might have been at one time. It was just about having someone to sit with at the breakfast table and have a cup of coffee with and talk about nothing and everything. And that’s a stubborn, consistent human need.”

Gilbert’s venture into the historical and social implications of marriage in Committed, especially as it pertains to women, ranges far and wide, from the 11th century, when ideas about marriage were more liberal than today, to modern Europe, where there is far less emphasis on matrimony than in America. It all makes for interesting and informative reading.

Readers who are hoping for more memoir, less research, might be disappointed in this new book. But it accomplishes what Gilbert set out to do—to bring peace to her decision to marry Felipe.

“I certainly went in with a great deal of aversion and hostility to this institution and I left with a new respect for marriage, simply for no other reason than for its almost Darwinian survival—the fact that this thing endures. Anything that lasts that long, including cockroaches and crocodiles, you have to admire. There’s something kind of remarkable about that. What could be called a kind of fusty, decrepit old institution continues to reinvent itself and re-evolve with every century, every generation,” Gilbert says.

“So instead of feeling like I’m being stamped into this form that doesn’t suit me, I can feel like I’m part of a very long story that’s always being rewritten. And now I have the rewriting of that tale.”

Rebecca Bain is a freelance writer and editor in Nashville.

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Attitudes toward assisted suicide for the terminally ill are seldom lukewarm—people either believe strongly that this course of action should be sanctioned or, just as strongly, that no one has the right to end another’s life, even for medical reasons and at that person’s request. Zoe FitzGerald Carter firmly believed in an individual’s right to take this difficult step until her own mother decided it was time to die. The anguish Carter felt, her conflicting emotions and the upheaval it caused in her family are painstakingly chronicled in her first book, a memoir titled Imperfect Endings: A Daughter’s Tale of Life and Death.

“It really was an incredibly difficult year,” says Carter, speaking from the home in Berkeley, California, that she shares with her husband and their two daughters. “I felt like my life had been derailed, and it was death and dying 24 hours a day. I started feeling very isolated from my husband and children because I felt like the predominant emotional event in my life was not with them. It was with this maddening, endless, difficult discussion with my mother which at some point I realized was only going to end when she died.”

There was never any doubt about whether Carter’s mother was terminally ill. Twenty years earlier, she had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s, and she was already dependent on around-the-clock assistance for the smallest of tasks. It was obvious that she would soon be unable to get out of bed at all. Her pain was increasingly resistant to drugs. So why did Carter refuse to go along with her mother’s decision?

“I live in Berkeley, and there are people who’ve read this book and they say, what was your problem? Why didn’t you just help her kill herself? You should have helped her go, it was what she wanted. And I don’t know if it’s because they haven’t experienced anything like this or it’s all about politics and assisted suicide should be legal, end of story. I think it’s probably because people have this idea—oh yeah, if I get sick, take me out back and shoot me. But I think when they get down to it, it’s a lot more complicated than that.”

It certainly proved complicated for Carter and her two sisters. While none of them wanted their mother to cease to be a living, breathing part of their lives, their responses to her decision to end her life were quite different. Her sister Hannah became Carter’s lifeline, the only person who shared her conflicting emotions. Katherine, the oldest sister, basically checked out of the whole scenario, saying their mother’s decision to die, her constant shifting of her “death date,” her demands that her daughters be by her side when she died, were all a shameless bid for attention—which Katherine refused to give her. It was important to Carter that this division among the sisters be chronicled in Imperfect Endings.

“I do think when a parent dies that what happens among the siblings, if there are siblings, is a really big part of the story: who shows up, who doesn’t show up, the different ways that they show up. The whole histories that we have in our families oftentimes emerge and intensify, and alliances and animosities and old regrets get reactivated and ratcheted up in these situations.”

Part of the impact of Carter’s book comes from her juxtaposition of chapters; she weaves her past into her memoir, giving the reader a more satisfying context to use as a contrast with the present. It becomes a reminder that an imperfect childhood often becomes irrelevant when a parent is dying. Musing on why this was important for her to bring out in her book, Carter says a relationship with a dying family member differs from any that has preceded it.

“When you’re with somebody who’s dying, you really do love them in this very pure way. You just love them and you’re there for them. It’s very healing. A lot of my anger and pain around my mother’s decision really dropped away at the end.”

Despite the gravity of the subject matter, there are sections of Imperfect Endings that are quite funny. The visit from the “Exit Guide” from the Hemlock Society is one such example: Carter’s snobbish mother cannot bring herself to allow this man to orchestrate her demise, not because she is bothered by “getting gassed,” but because he’s a good ol’ boy from Tulsa named Bud. This is, as Carter writes, a serious social handicap: “My mother is a solid Washington Democrat, a liberal even, but she’s also a cultural and intellectual snob, and this man is definitely not a member of the tribe.”

In the end, Carter’s mother (at the suggestion of her doctor) decides to refuse all food and water until her body ceases to function. It is this action that sways Carter to accept her mother’s choice of death and brings her to her mother’s bedside for the final time.

“I mean she didn’t eat, day after day after day. This was not a ‘dark night of the soul’ kind of moment where she took a bunch of pills and killed herself. This was something she talked about and thought about for a year and then persisted in, day after day at the end. . . . I saw her absolute commitment and unblinking strength during that fasting time.”

One cannot help but wonder, with all Carter went through, whether she would ever put her own family through such an ordeal. She says yes, but only if her daughters agreed that it was the right thing to do and were comfortable with the decision.

“I do believe assisted suicide should be legal, but you have to recognize that nobody wants to do it. Nobody wants to be in a place where they feel that is the best option. It’s not easy. And there is a price you pay for it. I do feel like there’s a price my sisters and I paid emotionally and psychologically by participating in my mother’s death. I think it’s a tricky issue.”

But, as Carter says, it was a privilege to be by her mother’s side when she ended her years of pain, although it’s not a topic she brings up at cocktail parties or the school’s PTO.

“People are uncomfortable talking about death. People think it’s all just a big downer, and it’s scary and awful. I don’t think it’s all just scary and awful. I think there’s something very life-affirming about going through a death with somebody. There’s nothing like death to remind you of one of the most profound things about life, which is that it doesn’t go on forever. That sense of gratitude for being alive and awareness of the gift of life is a wonderful thing to experience.”

Rebecca Bain is a writer in Nashville.