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. "This is one of the best memoirs of the decade—a cool-water baptism, so bracing I felt transformed." —Jia Tolentino, author of Trick Mirror "An elegant and philosophical memoir about addiction whose stakes are no less than what comprises one's will to live." —Melissa Febos, author of The Dry Season** 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.