The Little Liar
The Little Liar
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Mitch Albom on The Little Liar
In his own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why he wrote it
The moment at Yad Vashem that changed everythingAlbom grew up in New Jersey with Holocaust survivors as neighbors, close enough that he noticed, as a child, why they wore long sleeves in summer heat. That proximity gave him a felt sense of the Holocaust long before he considered writing about it, and it also raised the bar: he would not attempt it until he had something genuinely new to say.
Where I grew up in New Jersey, there were people on my block who would always wear long-sleeved sweaters or shirts, during even in the hot summer weather, and I once asked my mother, ‘Why are these people always wearing long sleeves?’ and she said, ‘Well, they have these numbers tattooed above their wrists and they’re self-conscious about people seeing them.’ That was the first indication that people went through something so horrifying, and obviously I learned a lot more about it as I grew up.
The specific angle he had been missing arrived during a stop at what he believes was Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial and museum in Jerusalem, while he was already on tour for a different book. What a survivor said there answered a question that had nagged him since childhood: why didn’t more people resist at the trains.
I happened to go to, I think it was Yad Vashem in Israel on a book tour trip... One of them was saying how they used Jewish people to lie to their own people about getting on these trains. After all, if a Nazi guard is standing there and he goes, ‘Get on the train,’ and you think you’re going to your death, you might as well die on the platform. You might as well fight. Why did so many people not fight? They were tricked. They were lied to. To use your own people to lie to you, I thought, that’s something that I haven’t really seen. That was the germ of the idea.
The historical atrocity gave him his setting, but he needed a reason to write the book now, in this political moment. He found it in a pattern he saw repeating in contemporary American public life, one the novel’s narrator, Truth (a personified voice who has been personally wounded by the lying it witnesses), would be positioned to call out directly.
The truth is empirical. The truth is one thing. And yet, in our country, we tend to retreat to our corners and say we’re only going to look at the events of the world through this lens or through that lens. And that can distort the truth greatly.
He also arrived at the book with a structural conviction about where Holocaust stories tend to end and where, in his view, they should begin. The novel’s timeline reflects that conviction: most of it unfolds in the 1950s through the 1980s, tracing what survival costs over a lifetime.
I wanted to write a story that showed the lies that we tell in our lives, and how we spend much of our lives trying to get forgiveness for the lies that we tell.
How he wrote it
Truth as a wounded narrator, Thessaloniki as a forgotten cityAlbom needed a narrative voice that could move freely across decades and across characters’ inner lives without collapsing into either standard third-person distance or first-person limitation. He had solved a version of this problem once before, in a novel about a musician, and he returned to that solution.
A number of books ago I wrote a book called The Magic Strings of Frankie Presto. The music was the narrator because it was a book all about a guitar player. And I really liked that voice. It gave you a perspective that was different from neither the third person or the first person.
Choosing Thessaloniki as the novel’s opening city was itself a research finding. Most readers, he discovered, did not know that the most Jewish city in prewar Europe was in Greece, and that erasure felt like part of what the book needed to restore. He went there in person, and what he found in the city’s architecture went straight into the novel’s recurring symbol.
A lot of people don’t realize that Greece was even involved in the Holocaust, or that the most Jewish city in all of Europe was actually Thessaloniki. That was the only city in all of Europe that had a Jewish majority population.
On that research trip he heard the story of the White Tower, a landmark once so stained with blood from its use as a prison that it was called the Red Tower. A condemned man volunteered to whitewash it entirely by hand in exchange for his freedom, and Albom wove that story through the novel as a recurring image of what a person will do, and endure, in pursuit of being forgiven.
He held himself to a strict factual record for everything outside the fictional characters themselves, consulting survivor testimony and nailing down the specific dates of the Thessaloniki deportations. But his personal test for whether a scene was ready had nothing to do with archival accuracy.
I kind of have a litmus test that if I don’t choke up a little bit, or feel like a shiver or a tingle when I write something, it’s not good enough. And I need to keep working on it until I do. [paraphrased from audio]
Before the manuscript went to his publisher, he ran it past an unusual set of early readers: older children at the orphanage he has run in Haiti since 2010. Without television, internet, or phones, they read everything he brings, and their responses shaped the book’s final form.
We don’t have TV, we don’t have internet, we don’t have phones, so they read. So I give them my books and say, ‘well, before I put them out, like, what do you think? Should I make some edits?’ And I get some pretty good ideas from them actually. [paraphrased from audio]
The personal thread
A childhood block, an orphanage, and Morrie’s last lessonThe book’s emotional architecture, Nico spending decades seeking forgiveness while Fannie withholds it, grew out of a specific exchange from Albom’s Tuesday visits with his dying professor Morrie Schwartz, visits he later turned into Tuesdays with Morrie. That conversation gave the novel its moral spine.
You need to forgive everybody, everything, no matter how much they hurt you, whatever, if you care about them, if you love them, forgive everybody everything and forgive yourself. [paraphrased from audio]
The children he works with in Haiti, many of them carrying their own histories of loss and displacement, shaped how he wrote the novel’s young characters. He had spent years watching children absorb trauma without the vocabulary to name it, and that experience filtered directly into the book’s portrayal of Nico at eleven years old on the train platform.
I wanted to write a book about truth and forgiveness. Setting it during the war, when lies were so prevalent and forgiveness so needed, seemed to be the perfect setting. I had heard a testimony by a war survivor about how the Germans would trick Jewish people into lying to their own people during the war, and I thought this would make a great backdrop for a piece about the truth in lies.
What he wants us to sit with
One truth, two kinds of forgiveness, and a grandfather’s nightly ritualHe opens his author events for this book with a question he says most people refuse to answer out loud: what is the biggest lie you have ever told? The follow-up question is the one the novel actually runs on, from the first scene at the Thessaloniki train platform to the final confrontation between Nico and Fannie decades later.
We have to understand that there’s one truth and that’s what the voice of truth in The Little Liar kind of does, it says, ‘No, you can’t treat me like it’s a buffet. You take a slice of this and a slice of that... That’s not what truth is. Truth is a meal that you have to eat.’ [paraphrased from audio]
Albom wants readers to feel the weight of forgiveness in both directions: the person who needs to receive it and the person who needs to give it. He treats these as equally urgent, and equally misunderstood.
A lot of people don’t realize that the need to forgive somebody is as compelling as the need to be forgiven. [paraphrased from audio]
He wrote the book during a period when he was watching children in Haiti name their losses and still find reasons to keep going. That experience gave him a specific scene: a grandfather in a concentration camp barracks who gathers his family each night in whispers, asking each of them to name one good thing from the day. The grandfather’s ritual anchors the book’s argument about where hope actually lives.
If you’re going to write about hope, set it during the most hopeless time. [paraphrased from audio]