The new book by Donald Miller is tragic, hopeful—and fantastic.
Donald Miller has done it again. A Million Miles in a Thousand Years (Thomas Nelson) is a darker Blue Like Jazz with liberal infusions of Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird. Part writer’s manual, part memoir, and subtitled, “What I Learned While Editing My Life,” A Million Miles explores “the concept that all of us are living stories, and those stories teach other people to live stories. And what our stories are about matters, not just for us but for the world.” At least, so Miller explains it to his publisher: the work itself is a mosaic, swirling with colorful anecdotes, brilliant personalities, shaded throughout with suffering.
Interestingly, this newest work has more of a plot than any of Miller’s books since Through Painted Deserts: the story begins with a famous director asking him to help write the screenplay for a film version of Blue Like Jazz. As they hack and hew his life to craft a gripping 120-minute narrative, Miller has an epiphany: “My real life was boring.” He recalls a moment of desperation, when he entered his condo and “realized there were no pictures on my mantel … I stood for a while and heard the voices of children who didn’t exist and felt the tender touch of a wife who wanted me to listen to her. I felt, at once, the absent glory of a life that could have been.” But as he begins to piece together a screenplay, Miller wonders “if life could be lived more like a good story in the first place.”
That ambition animates the pages of A Million Miles: the reader follows Miller’s attempts since writing Blue Like Jazz to confront his personal demons and take hold of “a better story.” Along the way, he meets a dizzying array of memorable personalities, from the outrageous Goffs, who have sleepovers with heads of state, to Bob, the addict-turned-cyclist, to Randy, a father who rescues his family by forcing them to build an orphanage.
Miller’s vivid depiction of his own struggles makes this a difficult read in parts. Rob Bell was right to call this book “really, really disturbing … convicting, powerful, unsettling,” all the more so because anyone who has read Miller’s prose—conversational, hilarious, self-deprecating by turns—cannot help but think of him as a friend. And so it is from the empathy and regret of friendship that we see him strive to navigate the churning courses of romance, witness him search for his vanished father, and cheer him in the fierce struggle to lose weight. Indeed, he writes, “Most of the painful scenes in my life involve being fat. I got fat as a kid and got fatter as an adult.” We sit with Miller in a hotel room after a bad breakup, gasping and weeping in desperate agony; we watch him weather waves of pent-up grief over his father on the side of a highway.
However, along with the shame, A Million Miles offers much glory, particularly in the story of Miller’s transformation, which unfolds almost whimsically: he impulsively purchases a road-bike, still-more impulsively agrees to hike the Andes with a friend, in a fit of nervousness invites a girl he has a crush on to join the trip, and, finally, agrees to ride his bike across the country to raise money for wells in Africa. From friends such as Bob Goff—his lawyer-friend turned slumber-party-diplomat—he begins to contemplate telling a better story with his life, going on to found The Mentoring Project, a non-profit that places mentors in the lives of underprivileged boys across the country.
And of course, the back roads and by-ways of A Million Miles abound with Miller’s characteristic wry asides and occasional moments of inspiration sure to make the writer in each reader hang his head in futility. “We are all poems coming out of the mud,” he offers early on, later clarifying: “I feel written. My skin feels written, and my desires feel written.” He describes the writing process: “I paced and I was catching spirits.” And again: “I read a Ray Bradbury book about writing that said writing should be fun … I don’t know what drugs Ray Bradbury is on, but I’d like to.” My favorite line was Miller’s suggestion that Nietzsche “is the Justin Timberlake of depressed Germans.”
Lurking at the margins of each page of this book about writing one’s life is “a Writer outside ourselves, plotting a better story for us, interacting with us, even, and whispering a better story into our consciousness.” So, finally and fittingly, this book is an invitation to join a better story, one animated by “the gospel of Jesus,” which “offers hope.” It is an invitation to “speak something into nothing,” rather than continuing to “critique the existing story, or lament about [one’s] boredom, like a critic.” On the final page, Miller muses: “How brightly a better story shines. How easily the world looks to it in wonder.”
When I was sixteen, I spent most of one night reading Through Painted Deserts at a friend’s house; at 5 AM when I finished, I woke my friend in a frenzy, announcing that we were going on a road trip that weekend. A great book is an open door into a new kind of life, so that to read and return unchanged is not truly to have read at all. So, if you have time to read A Million Miles more than once, you will likely have missed the point, for this is a book to sear the hearts of its readers, a book to galvanize them, to move them out and onward into better stories of their own.
