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

Miller’s book A Million Miles in a Thousand Years marries the genres of memoir and self-help, incorporating elements of each and blurring the boundaries between the two. Memoir, a form of narrative nonfiction, is premised on an author’s personal memories and unfolds through the author’s perspective, focusing on formative and notable moments from the author’s own life. While revisiting the past, the author often adopts an introspective lens that turns their memories into tools for self-exploration. Memoirs take many forms and often employ fiction-writing techniques to tell the story. Some focus on a specific time in the writer’s life such as Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, which chronicles her childhood and adolescence. Others, such as Joan Didion’s A Year of Magical Thinking, provide an exploration of a specific theme such as grief or memory. Still others are organized as a series of essays such as David Sedaris’s Me Talk Pretty One Day. Miller’s memoir uses techniques and structural elements of the self-help