Donald Miller is the author of such bestselling titles as BLUE LIKE JAZZ and A MILLION MILES IN A THOUSAND YEARS. He has spent his career placing special emphasis on being the funny and smart man. While he is both, Miller admits that for far too long he had been hiding behind his carefully coifed persona to the detriment of relational intimacy.

Telling his own story in the first person, Miller shares with readers that he was a serial dater. He would meet and date a woman, allowing her to believe he was far more into the relationship than he was. When marriage was suggested, he’d pull back and break it off. Finally, after years of repeating this same pattern, he realized the damage he was doing to these women and how utterly damaged he was himself. At one of his low points of introspection, a treasured friend told Miller that he was good at relationships. The irony was that he realized how far he had to travel to become healthy enough for a long-term, intimate relationship with a woman (and with his friends). Miller took part in a self-discovery program where he was a “patient” of sorts and learned through some painful exercises how to know who he really is on the inside…as well as how to take down the masks he had been hiding behind his entire life.

"Rather than SCARY CLOSE resembling a sappy love story, each step of the journey is compelling and fascinating because Miller offers readers an  intimate insider’s view and then invites them to take some steps toward intimacy for themselves."

Through 16 lively written chapters, Miller pulls back the curtain of his life and exposes his innermost fears in the hope that readers might be challenged to do the same and heal from the inside out just as he did. Some of his stories are hilarious, and readers will chuckle as they relate to his self-deprecating take on life’s more emotionally taxing events. Other parts of the book are somber and seriously laid out (and well should be). In these sections, readers will find solid resources for taking a good hard look at their own inner selves and deciding whether or not some areas need changing.

Specifically, Miller discusses such topics as the distracting noises of insecurity; everybody’s got a story and it’s not the one they’re telling; performance anxiety in real life; five kinds of manipulators; the risk of being careful; great parents do this well; do men do intimacy differently?; others never complete us; and letting go of living as a control freak. In each chapter, Miller shares a little about his growing relationship with his now-wife, Betsy, and how she challenged him to reveal his true self to her as they dated. In a gently flowing style, readers will travel alongside Miller as he romances his gal, woos her, and then marries her.

Rather than SCARY CLOSE resembling a sappy love story, each step of the journey is compelling and fascinating because Miller offers readers an  intimate insider’s view and then invites them to take some steps toward intimacy for themselves.