Quick Take
- Narration: Bart Millard reads with the conviction of someone who has lived every sentence, and the multi-voice structure gives the marriage story genuine dimension.
- Themes: Faith under sustained suffering, the fragility of marriage on tour, grace without guaranteed outcomes
- Mood: Intimate and quietly heartbreaking, with a resilience that never tips into triumphalism
- Verdict: A companion to the song and film that earns its existence independently of either, honest about what devotion costs when everything keeps going wrong.
There are some audiobooks you listen to during the easy hours and some that find you during the harder ones. I started Even If on a Tuesday evening when I was already in a contemplative mood, coming off a week that had been unexpectedly difficult in small, cumulative ways. What Bart Millard and Shannon Millard offer here met that mood directly, without sentimentality and without false comfort.
MercyMe was a small worship band from Texas until January 2002, when I Can Only Imagine became something no one anticipated: a crossover phenomenon that rewrote the rules for Christian music’s relationship to mainstream radio. Bart Millard tells that origin story briefly and then moves past it, which is the right decision. Even If is not about that success. It is about what happened after it, and during it, and because of it, and despite it.
Three Voices, One Shared Wreckage
The book is structured around three narrative voices: Bart, Shannon, and their son Sam, who was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes as a child. This architecture is one of the memoir’s genuine strengths. You do not get a single filtered perspective on the strain the band’s touring schedule placed on the Millard marriage. You get Bart’s account of it, and Shannon’s, and those accounts are not always the same story. The gap between them is where the emotional honesty of the book lives.
Shannon’s brother died in a tragic accident during the period when MercyMe was riding its biggest commercial wave. Their second child was born prematurely. The diabetes diagnosis arrived. Bart describes feeling the weight of the band’s success as something that isolated him rather than buoyed him, a responsibility that kept him on the road while his family navigated crisis after crisis without him physically present. Reviewer Courtney Turpin noted that the book is real and raw about the difficulty of following what feels like God’s purpose, and that rawness is precisely what separates it from the genre of Christian celebrity memoir that papers over difficulty with testimony.
The Song as Theology, Not Marketing
The title refers to Millard’s later song Even If, which takes as its starting point the hardest version of faith: the willingness to trust God not when prayers are answered but when they are not. That theological position is explored with more seriousness and less comfort here than most listeners will expect from an artist working in the CCM space. Millard is not trying to inspire you. He is trying to tell you what happened, and what it cost him to reach a faith that could hold the worst possibilities without collapsing.
The connection to the motion picture I Can Only Imagine 2 is mentioned in the book’s marketing, but Even If stands independently of any film. Readers who came to this via the movie will find depth that the screen cannot hold. Readers encountering it without that prior context will find a memoir that functions on its own terms, about a marriage under pressure and a faith that had to be remade rather than simply maintained.
What the Runtime Cannot Rush
At just over five hours, this is a compact listen. Reviewer Faye D. Gaddis found the three-perspective structure beautifully written and hard to put down, and the pacing is indeed efficient without feeling truncated. There are moments when I wanted more time inside Shannon’s perspective specifically. She emerges as the more psychologically complex narrator of the two, bearing the domestic weight of the family’s crises while Bart bore the professional weight of the band’s momentum, and the book occasionally gestures toward that asymmetry without fully excavating it.
Still, what Even If accomplishes within its constraints is significant. It is a book about suffering that does not offer relief from the suffering as its organizing promise. It offers instead the possibility of meaning, which is a harder and more honest thing to offer, and Bart Millard’s narration of his own life carries that distinction without ever making it feel like a theological argument. It feels, instead, like a man telling you what happened to him and what he made of it, which is the only version of this story worth hearing.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Even If accessible to listeners who are not already familiar with MercyMe or the song of the same name?
Yes. While the book has an obvious appeal to existing fans of the band and the I Can Only Imagine story, it is structured as a standalone memoir about faith, marriage, and grief. Prior knowledge of MercyMe’s catalog is not required to engage fully with the material.
Does the book deal honestly with the difficulty in the Millard marriage, or does it present a smoothed-over version of their faith journey?
The multi-narrator structure is precisely what prevents smoothing over. Bart and Shannon speak in alternating voices, and their accounts of the same period in their marriage are sometimes significantly different in emphasis. The gap between those accounts is where the book’s emotional honesty operates.
How does the audiobook narration work with multiple voices, and are transitions between perspectives clearly marked?
The structural shifts are clearly signaled and each voice is distinct in register and tone. The use of three narrators is one of the audiobook’s specific advantages over the print experience, giving each perspective genuine acoustic differentiation rather than relying on chapter breaks alone.
Is this book essentially a companion piece to the I Can Only Imagine film, or does it stand alone?
It stands alone. While it is marketed in connection with the I Can Only Imagine 2 film, the memoir covers a distinct period in the Millard family’s life and engages with different questions than the original film addressed. Readers who have not seen either movie will find it complete and self-contained.
