Will and Attention

In this luminous memoir of secret drinking, fragile recovery, and the deep pull of religion, award-winning essayist Meghan O’Gieblyn seeks to understand why it is so hard to sustain the difficult work of personal change.

After leaving evangelical Christianity in her early twenties, kicking an addiction, and building a life as a writer, Meghan O’Gieblyn was admired by her friends for having a strong will. Then, in her late thirties, she began secretly attending Catholic mass and meeting with a priest to discuss conversion. After eleven years of sobriety, she began drinking again. Both returns—to organized religion and to alcohol—felt to her like a regression, a personal defeat. Knowledge and determination had proven useless when it came to her most vexing personal battles.

In Will and Attention, O’Gieblyn captures those perplexing days. Soon after her return to sobriety, she looked to a series of spiritual texts for answers and began putting them in conversation with her life. She was struck by the words of philosopher and mystic Simone Weil: “We have to try to cure our faults by attention and not by will.”  Will had certainly failed her; perhaps the answer lay in attention to her wandering mind and heart? Inspired by this possibility, she set out to find a spirituality that could meet her longings and prove capacious enough to hold the dark side of human nature.

The book tracks her pursuit as she practices social distancing among the academics and artists of her Midwestern college town; attends conferences as part of the AI commentariat when the world opens again; traces her evangelical roots at a Bible camp on the dunes of Lake Michigan, and reminisces about her early years lost to drinking. Faced at midlife with the temptation to blow it all up, she seeks the grounding consolations of marriage, friendship, political engagement, and art. She makes a case for finding beauty in what is good.

Written with the sparkling intellect and searching rigor that are Meghan O’Gieblyn’s signature, Will and Attention is a singular memoir of recovery and discovery that plumbs the elusive nature of our power over ourselves.