A Million Miles in a Thousand Years by Donald Miller

January 25, 2020January 27, 2023 by samanthareads In Book Club, Samanthareads 1 Comment

“A million miles in a thousand years” by Donald Miller was the catalyst for me starting this website. Fittingly it is also my first review.

Reading this book was like taking a step outside after rotting my brain on a lazy weekend shut inside. A reminder that there’s a world out there with things to do—a wake up call I desperately needed. At the time when I read this book, created this website, and wrote this review (in that order) my life was a lazy weekend. I needed a breath of fresh air and Donald Miller’s words delivered.

Looking back 3 years removed and I can tell you his book changed my life.

A million miles begins with Don being approached by two men in the film industry interested in adapting his memoir into a movie. The catch being it would need to be livened up for the big screen. His life was too boring to be portrayed as it had been in the memoir.

This becomes Don’s challenge: What makes a good story and how can he make his life a better one? Most of the book parallels him investigating this question. This book reads as Don’s personal thesis; if he wants to be able to write better stories he needs to first live a better life. He guides us through his journey discovering what makes a life good and how to create a better life for himself, while simultaneously teaching the reader how they can do the same. At 24, I’ve been struggling to begin my story and steer it in a direction I want to go.

Of all the people in my life, I thought this book would best serve my mom.
The main scene in the book that made me think of her is when the wife of a friend of passes. Miller describes the gathering at his friends’ house after the ceremonies. Many friends and family come together to celebrate this woman’s life and the time they were privileged to spend with her. He is observing the gathering when he thinks to himself, “I wonder how much it costs to be rich in friends and how many years and stories and scenes it takes to make a rich life happen. You can’t build an end scene as beautiful as this by sitting on a couch.”

The couch anecdote has more meaning for my life than my mothers, but the part of the quote where it talks about being rich in friends and having a rich life, is nothing short of what I want for my mother. It’s nothing short of what I want for me, or my sister, or anyone else I know. Not unlike many parents who reclaim their lives after their kids fly the coop, my mom and dad are rebuilding their story. A story without kids to take care of, where they are once again the main characters.
It’s my mom’s time to take her story wherever she wants it to continue and I want her to know it.

I sent the book to her and she said she loved it and that she took lots of notes. She will be passing it on to my sister next. I’m not sure what parts of the book she liked best but I’m hoping she’ll write about it here.

Quotes from the book I’d like to remember:

“No girl who plays the role of a hero dates a guy who uses her. She knows who she is. She just forgot for a little while.”

“It hit me then that while I had spent my twenties daydreaming and avoiding the reality of crying children, this man I didn’t know had met a woman and started a real family with real children who were not literary inventions, but actual characters who cried in coffee shops. This sort of life once sounded boring to me. It was too real, too unromantic, I suppose. But there in Boston it occurred to me that his story was better than mine for the simple fact that his story was actually happening. He was doing real things with real people while I’d been typing words into a computer.”

“Your life is a blank page. You write on it.”

“The truth is, we are all living out the character of the roles we have played in our stories.”

“The point of a story is never about the ending, remember. It’s about your character getting molded in the hard work of the middle. At some point the shore behind you stops getting smaller, and you paddle and wonder why the same strokes that used to move you now only rock the boat.”

“She had married a guy, and he was just a guy. He wasn’t going to make all her problems go away, because he was just a guy. And that freed her to really love him as a guy, not as an ultimate problem solver.”