Will and Attention

Award-winning author Meghan O’Gieblyn returns with her most personal writing yet, a spiritual autobiography that contemplates addiction, recovery and the mystifying nature of the will.

In her late thirties, Meghan O’Gieblyn found herself confronting the bewildering persistence of desires and compulsions she believed she had overcome. Earlier that year, she had returned to an addiction she had kicked in her twenties, a habit of drinking she thought was long behind her. The year before that, she had been briefly drawn back to the faith she had renounced decades earlier, through a friendship she developed with a Catholic priest. Both of these events felt like acts of regression—returning to solutions that had not worked for her in the past—and they fundamentally unsettled her belief that she was a unified self with transparent motives. How is a person to avoid those irrational mistakes that they continually return to, despite knowing they are harmful? Can we truly master our will or are we always divided selves?

O’Gieblyn’s crisis moves her to spend a year reading the work of Simone Weil, the philosopher and political activist who also struggled with questions of faith and whose essay “Attention and Will” provides a loose frame for the book. Will and Attention, like all O’Gieblyn’s writing, is both beautifully written and intellectually sparkling. Combining memoir, literary criticism, and philosophical inquiry, it explores a fundamental question of being human: the mystifying nature of our power over ourselves.