I have built most of a career on a single, faintly ridiculous premise: what if you could go back and do it all again, only properly this time? My characters are forever being handed a fresh crack at life. It sells rather well. The trouble is, miracles rarely happen in real life, so we muddle along with what we have.
So I wanted to know whether the thing I keep writing about actually happens. Do real people, with no supernatural assistance and no time portal in a suburban hallway, genuinely turn their lives around? Or is the second chance a comforting story we tell ourselves on the drive home, somewhere between the news and the traffic jams?
The myth we all quietly subscribe to
We are soaked in the idea. Films end on it. Songs lean on it so hard the chorus practically begs. And then there’s the bloke at the gym who reinvented himself as a “wellness coach” and now posts about his journey roughly nine times a day. The second chance is one of the most reassuring stories we own, because it promises the worst chapter of your life need not be the last one. It says the binman can become a businessman. It says the man who peaked at eighteen still has a third act in him, provided he stops eating a family pack of Wotsits at two in the morning.
It’s a lovely idea. The question is whether it survives contact with reality, or whether it belongs in the same drawer as “this time I really will use the loft for storage and not just lob things up there in a panic.”
Exhibit A: the man who came back
Consider Andre Agassi. In November 1997, the most famous hair in tennis had slid to number 141 in the world. A wrist injury. A marriage coming apart at speed. A season of first-round exits in front of crowds you could count without removing your shoes. The comeback should have been impossible. Instead he won five titles the following year, and in 1999 took the French Open to complete the career Grand Slam, becoming only the fifth man in history to win all four majors. From 141 to the summit of the sport. If you put that in a novel, an editor would scrawl “too neat” in the margin and send it back.
Exhibit B: the man who baked his way out
Or take Dave Dahl. Before he lent his name to the loaf sitting in supermarkets across America, Dahl spent around fifteen years, on and off, in prison: burglary, armed robbery, drug addiction, the full unhappy set. By his own account, the turning point arrived during his fourth stint inside, when he simply decided he never wanted to return. He went back to the family bakery in Portland, started making a dense, seedy, organic bread, and sold it at a farmers’ market with his recovery story printed on the packaging. In 2015 the family sold the business for 275 million dollars. The convict became the brand. Try pitching that to a publisher with a straight face.
Why it feels rarer than it is
Here’s the bit the headline versions leave out. Agassi and Dahl make the news precisely because they are exceptional. We notice the spectacular reversals and quietly ignore the far larger number of people who tried, wobbled, and slid back to roughly where they started. Survivorship bias does an enormous amount of heavy lifting in the second-chance industry. For every story with a triumphant final paragraph, there are dozens with no paragraph at all, because nobody writes up the man who meant to change and then didn’t.
But that, I think, misreads what a second chance actually is. The dramatic version, the rags-to-riches, prison-to-275-million sort, is vanishingly rare. The ordinary version is everywhere, and we miss it because it doesn’t trend. The woman who retrains at fifty and never tells a soul how frightening she found it. The man who finally apologises to the brother he fell out with two decades back. The lad from school who messages you out of nowhere on Facebook to say he packed in the drinking, and means it this time. These are second chances too. They simply arrive without a film crew, which is probably why we undervalue them. If something matters, we assume it should have a soundtrack.
I’ve written before about what people say they’d change about their lives, and the answers are almost never dramatic. Hardly anyone wants to win the lottery. Most want a single conversation back, or one decision unmade. The second chance people actually long for is small.
The part the films skip
Here is what writing twenty-odd novels about do-overs has taught me, and it surprised me to type it. The second chance is real. People do change course; the evidence is sitting on a supermarket shelf wrapped in green packaging. But the version we crave, the clean slate where the past is wiped, and you begin again unburdened, doesn’t exist. That’s the bit I keep having to invent, because reality refuses to supply it.
My characters travel back and meddle. Craig fixes 1986. Sean travels back to save the girl whose life he ruined. Gary attempts to delete the day he met his own wife. Every single time, the universe charges a price they never saw coming. And every single time, I’m really writing the same quiet truth: you don’t erase the first chance to earn the second. You carry it with you. The second chance isn’t a reset button. It’s what you do with the wreckage of the first.
Which, oddly, makes the real thing more hopeful than the fantasy. A magic do-over would mean the old you simply vanishes. The genuine article means the old you stays, scars and all, and chooses differently anyway. That takes more nerve than any time machine.
So, do they happen?
Yes. Just not the way the posters promise. You won’t wake up new. You’ll wake up the same person, on the same street, with the same boiler making the same noise, and you’ll decide to do one thing differently. Then again the next day. That’s the whole machinery of it. Andre Agassi didn’t reinvent his soul; he turned up to training. Dave Dahl didn’t become someone else; he went back to the bread. The second chance never meant transformation. It meant a Tuesday, repeated with intent.
If any of this strikes a chord, the books below are my attempt to answer the same question, only with the magic switched on. In The ’86 Fix, Craig Pelling buys a can of Coke in 1986 and lands a weekend back in his teenage life to put things right; second chances, it turns out, come with terms and conditions. A Page in Your Diary hands Sean Hardy something rarer and harder: the chance to undo the damage he did to someone else, rather than to himself. And in The Last Stop Video Shop, Kevin Kershaw finds a VHS tape of a childhood memory that never existed, and must decide whether replaying his life counts as living it or merely hiding from it. Three different second chances. Not one of them free.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do second chances really happen, or are they just a comforting myth?
Yes, though less often and less cleanly than the films suggest. Real people do change direction; documented examples run from sportspeople rebuilding ruined careers to former prisoners founding successful companies. What rarely happens is the wipe-clean reset, where the past simply vanishes and you begin again unburdened. The second chance is real; the blank slate is the fiction.
What is the difference between a comeback and an ordinary second chance?
A comeback is the spectacular, public version: the athlete who returns to the top, or the founder who turns a prison record into a thriving brand. An ordinary second chance is quieter and far more common: retraining at fifty, mending a broken friendship, finally giving up a habit that held you back. Both count. Only one of them trends online.
Are famous second-chance stories actually representative?
Not really. Headline comebacks make the news precisely because they are unusual, so we overestimate how common they are. For every dramatic reversal, many people try, stumble, and end up roughly where they started. Survivorship bias means we see the winners and quietly overlook everyone else, which makes the odds look kinder than they truly are.
Can a person ever truly start over?
Rarely in the clean sense. You cannot delete what already happened, and most people carry their first chance with them rather than escaping it. What you can do is change what comes next. Starting over, in practice, tends to mean building something better on top of the old foundations, not bulldozing the site and pretending nothing ever stood there.
Which Keith A Pearson novels explore second chances?
Several of them circle the theme. The ’86 Fix follows Craig Pelling as he revisits 1986 to fix his own life; A Page in Your Diary sends Sean Hardy back to undo damage he caused someone else; and The Last Stop Video Shop asks whether replaying your past counts as a second chance or merely an escape from the present.