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Donald Miller's hit book, Blue Like Jazz, has sold hundreds of thousands of copies to non-traditional, spiritually seeking Christians. In his latest book, To Own a Dragon, Miller discusses the epiphany he had that growing up without a father affected him in myriad ways long after his childhood.

What was your experience growing up without a father?

My dad left before I remember anything. There were early memories of my mom interacting with my dad occasionally, trying to get a credit card back from him, but I don't have any memories of my dad. It all seemed pretty normal. It wasn't until five or six years ago that I even began to process the fact that something in my life had been missing. There were a lot of the things I didn't know. By know I mean that on a holistic level I didn't know that authority equals love, those sorts of things. I always felt like I was ten years behind in terms of the way I was living my life. I attribute that to not having a father.

It was watching a documentary about a group of orphaned elephants that helped you see the need for a male authority in your life.

Without the presence of older elephants in their lives to mentor them, these elephants remained in suspended musth cycles, which essentially is like a puberty phase. With an older male elephant there, their musth cycle will only last about three days. It's a very uncomfortable time, but it's eased when an older male elephant is in their life.

But for the elephants on this reserve, with no older males, their musth cycles did not end. They basically began to lose it. They acted out aggressively and violently toward other creatures. They began to withdraw from their tribe. When they introduced older male elephants into that community of orphaned elephants, their musth cycles ended. They were able to be normal.

It was very interesting to me that there is evidence in the animal kingdom that you are changed biochemically by your relationship to something outside of yourself. Young men are changed by their relationships with older men. There is evidence of that. So I began to wonder, what am I missing? How am I being affected by not having a dad? It was very eye-opening to me.

Just as the elephants acted abnormally, you were always worried that somehow you would end up in prison.

I have this fear. I'll drive by a prison and there's part of me that just knows that someday I'll be in there. That's my destiny. It's crazy, because there's nothing illegal going on in my life. Nor has there ever been, save for the occasional driving without car insurance when I was 19. I think it goes into this idea that you're destined for failure. Without a dad, there's never anyone telling you you're going to make it. You're going to succeed.

Your friend John MacMurray invited you to move in with his wife and kids. That experience taught you a lot about family life.

That was the first time I'd seen a family with a husband and wife and kids. It was very odd to me for the first year. From my perspective, it was a perfectly normal family with a woman and three kids, and then there was this man who kept spending the night. It was an odd sensation, but it was in that process that I began to see how beautiful a family really is. That was where I learned what I had really missed.

Why is it important for a guy to know what it is to be a man? And does that mean playing sports and fixing cars?

It's also important for a woman to know she's a woman, for a father to know he's a father. This isn't just an exclusive thing among men. But there is an identity that a man feels intrinsically. Somebody like John Eldridge would say the dominant question is, "Do I have what it takes?" For years, growing up in the church, manhood was elevated, and there were communication tools that were used that felt excluding to me. The mantra was real men love Jesus, or real men do this, or real men do that. A guy who didn't have a dad is at a disadvantage. When he hears that real men love Jesus, he assumes that if there are real men and not real men, I must be one of the not real men.

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June (Web-only) 2006, Vol. 50