Will and Attention
A Memoir

Quotes

“I was instantly helpless before Meghan O’Gieblyn’s Will and Attention, which spoke with a kind of flaying clarity and graceful consolation to a set of questions about worth, depravity, intention, and practice that scaffold my entire experience of the world. O’Gieblyn brings profound rigor to an examination of terrifying malleability; she is philosophically unrestricted while being uncompromising in her honesty about confusion and doubt. This is one of the best memoirs of the decade—a cool-water baptism, so bracing I felt transformed.”
—Jia Tolentino, New Yorker culture critic and author of Trick Mirror

“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.”
—Melissa Febos, author of Girlhood and The Dry Season

“Meghan O’Gieblyn is a seeker, a wry skeptic, a spiritual explorer, and a beautiful writer. Will and Attention amounts to a brilliant portrait of a brilliant person: gentle, melancholy, bracing, and astute.”
—Lorrie Moore, author of Birds of America and Self-Help

“Most memoirs look retroactively at—and therefore create—the story of the self. Will and Attention has dispensed with the notion that this is possible. Instead, 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.”
—Chloe Benjamin, author of The Immortalists and The Anatomy of Dreams

“O’Gieblyn’s memoir is a reminder of the power that is dormant in philosophy and poetry, fragments of human insight that lie ready to speak to us in times of need.”
—Clare Mac Cumhaill and Rachael Wiseman, co-authors of Metaphysical Animals

“Will and Attention is a gorgeous meditation on recovery, humanity, and spirituality. With profound wisdom, Meghan O'Gieblyn has penned a memoir that asks what it takes for us to return—and commit—to the goodness of our truest selves.”
—Qian Julie Wang, author of Beautiful Country

“An utterly compelling exploration of the mysteries of the human heart for anyone who’s fallen down and struggled to find forgiveness as they rise back up.”
—Quan Barry, author of We Ride Upon Sticks and The Unveiling

“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, among them Simone Weil, Iris Murdoch and Carl Jung. A bracing, beautiful book that reads like a fortifying talk with an intimate companion. Mesmerizing, invigorating, and profound.”
—Claire Vaye Watkins, author of Gold Fame Citrus and I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness

“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.”
—Keiran Goddard, author of I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning

"O’Gieblyn uses her lapses to do some exhilaratingly deep thinking about the meaning and purpose of her life. A novelistic, thrillingly confessional memoir."
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)