Miller:  I know, there’s no question. We’re having a dramatic effect on each other’s lives and we have no idea that we really are. Aren’t the people who have affected our lives the ones who have the most confidence that what they say and do matters? The people who have the confidence to come to us and say, “Hey, you did a great job and I’m proud of you”? Those are the people who have the most dramatic effect on our lives. But if you think about it from our perspective, we always say, “No, no, we wouldn’t dare, and who am I to say I’m proud of somebody?” We need to get over that and realize that what we say matters, and we need to own that responsibility. We need to affirm people and speak into their lives.

CW:  If that doesn’t happen, do you think there are life lessons or self-beliefs that a boy just won’t get without a father? If so, which ones?

Miller:  The biggest one is that he is affirmed and loved. Not going to learn that without a dad. Probably not going to learn it well without a mom, for that matter. It’s just a necessary component of upbringing to our well-being, to have a father say, “You’re loved, I love you, I care about you.” I long for that every day. I wish I had a dad who would say that. I’m 34, and I still want that. It’s not going to go away. There are other people who do that in our lives and that’s great, and everybody walks around with some sort of pain, some sort of wound, so I’m not playing the victim card here, but that’s the big one.

Then there are all sorts of lessons that we see, like the 85 percent of guys in prison who grew up without fathers. 85 percent. That’s an enormous percentage, and those are the ones who had no father in their home. If you think about the ones who had a bad father, you’re up over 95 percent. Only about 1 percent of all the men in prison had good father figures in their homes. That means if every father in America didn’t leave his family and cared about his kids, our prison population would be about 1 percent of what it is now. This is an enormous issue!

So yeah, there are things you will not learn unless you have a father in your home. That said, it’s not a hopeless case. I didn’t have a father in my home, and I write books, have a great life, teach at a school, interact with people, have good friends. But that’s because there were mentors in my life that taught me certain things. What I wanted to do with this book was go through what I had to learn elsewhere having grown up without a father. I missed out on so much, from how to deal with money, to how to make decisions, to how to talk to and engage a woman.

CW:  Speaking of affirmation, in "To Own a Dragon," you use a humorous story to make a strong case for what defines a “real man.” By offering a definition that, shall we say, is simply based in anatomy, are you opening yourself up to criticism that an overly-simple definition might undervalue cultural rites of passage that help boys slowly evolve into men?