‘Mesmerizing’ Claire Vaye Watkins, author of I Love You but I’ve Chosen Darkness
‘Staggering’ Keiran Goddard, author of I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning
‘Profound’ Chloe Benjamin, author of Under Story
In her late thirties, Meghan O’Gieblyn found herself in crisis. Earlier that year, she had relapsed back into an alcohol addiction she had kicked in her twenties. 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 happened in secret, hidden from everyone close to her, and both felt like acts of regression – a return to paths she had walked before. This 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? And can we ever satisfy the deep yearning our compulsions speak to?
‘Staggering’ Keiran Goddard, author of I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning
‘Profound’ Chloe Benjamin, author of Under Story
In her late thirties, Meghan O’Gieblyn found herself in crisis. Earlier that year, she had relapsed back into an alcohol addiction she had kicked in her twenties. 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 happened in secret, hidden from everyone close to her, and both felt like acts of regression – a return to paths she had walked before. This 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? And can we ever satisfy the deep yearning our compulsions speak to?
Reviews
Staggering. This is the single best book about the relationship between faith and addiction I have ever read, which, by definition, makes it the single best book about addiction I have ever read. A prayer to recovery in the deepest sense of the word: the reclamation of something fundamental. It turns out the God-shaped hole was book-shaped all along
Will and Attention is a feat of uncommon honesty. O'Gieblyn's intellectual rigor and spiritual bravery land her in the firmament of the finest thinkers to take up these two vast, essential, and entwined subjects. A bracing, beautiful book that reads like a fortifying talk with an intimate companion. Mesmerizing, invigorating, and profound
An elegant and philosophical memoir about addiction whose stakes are no less than what comprises one's will to live, what it means to be good, and the worth of devotion. I savored equally O'Gieblyn's sentences and the turns of her thought-at once precise as the cut of a razor and as pleasurably discursive as Montaigne
Meghan O'Gieblyn explores the recursive nature of struggle, the untidiness of growth, and the humility of being human. Will and Attention is a profound act of personal, spiritual, and philosophical inquiry. I'll be thinking about this book for a long time