A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life

#664
Title: A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life
Author: Donald Miller
Publisher: Thomas Nelson Publishers
Year: 2009
288 pages
Audiobook

Read by the author. I liked this less over time. It grew increasingly repetitive, the message increasingly religious, and the story seemed to discard its initial assertion that Miller was re-telling/re-making his life as he edited the movie of his previous autobiography. One of these problems wouldn't have bothered me, but 3 was too many. It may be that I'm trained as a narrative therapist, so I found Miller not only repetitive but reductive in his use of these techniques. Rather than opening up the story of his life, as seemed to be the premise and promise, he seems to substitute an authoritarian and limiting schema for previous aimlessness. Though taking on some of the responsibility for his experience, he moves quickly to attributions about an outside reality--god and evil forces--that wind up getting the glory (deity) or the blame (evil entity). This just seemed like externalizing, and externalizing to a well-worn, albeit heartfelt, cultural narrative. If this is what is meaningful for Miller, fine, but it's not what he said the book would be about.