On Not Being Someone Else: Tales of Our Unled Lives

Miller is charming company, both humanly and intellectually. He is onto something: the theme of unled lives, and the fascinating idea that fiction intensifies the sense of provisionality that attends all lives. An extremely attractive book.
-James Wood

A compendium of expressions of wonder over what might have been Swept up in our real lives, we quickly forget about the unreal ones. Still, there will be moments when, for good or ill, we feel confronted by our unrealized possibilities.
-New Yorker

Examining art’s capacity to transfix, multiply, and compress, this book is itself a work of art.
-Times Higher Education

We live one life, formed by paths taken and untaken. Choosing a job, getting married, deciding on a place to live or whether to have children-every decision precludes another. But what if you’d gone the other way?

From Robert Frost to Sharon Olds, Virginia Woolf to Ian McEwan, Jane Hirshfield to Carl Dennis, storytellers of every stripe consider the roads not taken, the lives we haven’t led. What is it that compels us to think this way and to identify with fictional and poetic voices tantalizing us with the shadows of what might have been? Not only poets and novelists, but psychologists and philosophers have much to say on this question. Miller finds wisdom in all of these disparate places, revealing the beauty, the allure, and the danger of confronting our unled lives.