Books

A Million Miles In A Thousand Years

Full of beautiful, heart-wrenching, and hilarious stories, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years details one man’s opportunity to edit his life as if he were a character in a movie.

Years after writing a best-selling memoir, Donald Miller went into a funk and spent months sleeping in and avoiding his publisher. One story had ended, and Don was unsure how to start another.

But he gets rescued by two movie producers who want to make a movie based on his memoir. When they start fictionalizing Don’s life for film–changing a meandering memoir into a structured narrative–the real-life Don starts a journey to edit his actual life into a better story. A Million Miles in a Thousand Years details that journey and challenges readers to reconsider what they strive for in life. It shows how to get a second chance at life the first time around.

Blue Like Jazz

When I started writing this book I just wanted to end up with something like Anne Lamott’s Traveling Mercies, because in Traveling Mercies it felt like she was free, free to be herself, to tell her story, to just vent, to rant, to speak as if she were talking to a friend. Traveling Mercies helped me write this book, and in a way, for a while, Anne will be “The Beatles” of spiritual writers, because she has influenced so many of us. I definitely feel as though I got permission from Anne Lamott, permission to be human and to interact with God without all of the mind-melt that comes with growing up in a religious family. I never believed it would be published, and so I was pretty open in this book. My career was dead when I started this thing, so I felt like I was just talking to myself, or to the little reading group that met at my house.

Sting has this song where he says that he is alone on an island and puts a message in a bottle and throws it into the ocean, only to wake the next morning and have a hundred million bottles washed upon his shore. He sings “I guess I’m not alone at being alone,” and I think that sums up how I feel about Blue Like Jazz. It feels like I thought I was alone but woke up one morning to discover nothing could be further from the truth. And people have been incredibly kind.

To Own A Dragon

I have wanted to write a book with John MacMurray for a long time. John is a hero of mine. I lived with him and his wife for four years. We started a business together and it failed. It was my fault. I owed John some dough, so that is how I suckered him into doing this with me. I told him if we wrote a book together he could get his money back and I would do most of the work. He reluctantly agreed. John hates the spotlight, but he is one of the greatest Bible teachers I know. He sits down with a Bible and goes into it like Ray Charles at the Piano. It’s in his blood, and you will never look at the book the same if you study under John.

So when I started thinking about a book for young guys who grew up without Dads, I got the idea to get John into it, so I called him and asked him if I could tell about what I learned from him, just about being a good human, and asked him if he would join me in telling the stories. I was excited when he finally said yes. In addition, I did a speaking gig to 900 high school guys, and I never do high school stuff, but I did this, right about the time I was wondering whether I should write this book, and I did the whole “a real man has a penis bit” and how I learned about manhood stuff, and they loved the material. That confirmed that I should write this book. It is probably the most direct book I have written. And John is a terrific addition.

Searching For God Knows What

I wrapped this book up in a bar on Hawthorne and that night I felt like I was losing it a bit. Essentially, I had begun to wonder if had misunderstood the gospel of Jesus, thinking of it in propositional terms rather than relational dynamics. The latter seemed too poetic to be true, but the former had been killing my soul for years and was simply illogical. If we hold that Jesus wanted us to “believe” certain ideas or “do” certain things in order to be a Christian, we are holding to heresy. In that bar on Hawthorne, I finished the last paragraph and felt a kind of sickness at the thought of whether or not I was telling the truth. But after further consideration, and after rewriting the book, I realized the formulaic version of Christianity was irrational, and for that matter, unbiblical. True Christian spirituality mirrors relational dynammics more than the workings of a free-market economy. This seemed to open up an entire new world to me, a world where every thought and feeling operates as a kind of living metaphor for the workings of the Godhead.

As a year has passed since the release of the book, I’ve seen more and more how, in my own life and in the lives of the Christians around me, we subscribe to false gospels that are troubling our souls. Because we live in a constant sales enviornment where we are told a certain car will make us sexy or a certain dishwashing detergent will be a miracle for our dishes, we assume the gospel of Jesus works the same way, that is, if we invest something, we get something more back. But this is not the case. To understand what the Bible explains Jesus’ gospel to be, we must look to each other, to the way a father interacts with a child, a bride to a bridegroom, a doctor to a patient. When we let go of the idea of Jesus as a product and embrace Him as a being, our path to spiritual maturity begins.

Through Painted Deserts

Through Painted Deserts will always be my favorite book. I think an author always likes his or her first book the best. I wrote it about five years ago and printed it with a conservative publishing company that, because of their market, needed to edit out some of the more authentic events and dialogue that took place on the road trip the book chronicled. In the rewrite, I put most of this stuff back. I took the rewrite pretty seriously, going so far as to get in my car and spend three months (longer than the actual trip itself) going back and visiting old haunts. I dont know if that helped the book very much, but it was definately fun. I have even wondered if a book about rewriting the book might be appropriate. In the second trip, I was dealing with a lot of forgiveness issues/identity issues that might make for interesting introspection. But I am a bit tired of writing about myself, so that might need to wait a few years.

What you will find in Through Painted Deserts is the begining of a long trail of walking away from home, from religion and from an american version of Christianity. You will also be introduced to Paul Harris, who, to this day, is my best friend in this world. Paul and I were strangers when we left Houston together, and so its a book about the begining of a friendship as much as it is about leaving different things.

I was reading a lot of Steinbeck and Hemingway when I wrote it the first time, and had moved on to Annie Dillard and more poetic voices in the rewrite. I found the combination interesting, although I think Steinbeck would roll over in his grave if he knew somebody was trying to imitate him, only adding poetics.

Rewriting the old book brought back some terrific memories. I even felt old crushes again as I wrote about some of the characters I had feelings for, and I missed the woods. I had just bought a house in Portland when I wrapped up the book and have begun to ache for the woods again, for freedom. I think it is very easy for us to think that life is just life, that beauty is something you go see every few years on family vacation. That’s a lie, it turns out. The invitation is always open.

A Review from The Dallas Morning News:

If you’re a Donald Miller fan, this one’s an update of his relatively unknown first book, Prayer and the Art of Volkswagen Maintenance, a hilarious yet poignant all-American road trip.

Mr. Miller and a friend take a 1971 Volkswagen van from Texas to Oregon: two guys on a pilgrimage to do life in a simpler way and find God in shared conversations and America’s scenery. It’s hardly a religious book, and yet Mr. Miller, true to his Blue Like Jazz style, calls his readers and himself to contemplate life’s “why” instead of “how.”

Through Mr. Miller’s raw vulnerability and vivid writing, the book is an engaging tale.

Warning: Could cause unquenchable wanderlust and a sudden urge to search eBay for a used VW van.

-Dallas Morning News