Will & Attention

Praise for Will and Attention

"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

“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

"This mesmerizing book, suffused with suffering and joy, ambivalence and insight, is itself an attempt to find a sense of wholeness — even if it is momentary and elusive, generated less by acts of will than by moments of grace."
—The New York Times Book Review

“O’Gieblyn, in the span of its pages, successfully manages to turn the authorial gaze fully on herself and the twinned problems introduced in its title: will, as in the idea of free will and to will to change our lives, and the attention we pay to self-examination and the world around us. Drawing on the French philosopher Simone Weil, the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, Catholic theology, and more, O’Gieblyn produces an addiction memoir that transcends the form, and offers a salient exploration of what varieties of care and attention we owe ourselves and others.”
—The Baffler

“The achievement of this memoir is its hard-won apprehension of beauty and its wonder at the sheer existence of the world.”
—Commonweal

“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

“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

“The poet Randall Jarrell once wrote, “Pain comes out of the darkness, and we call it wisdom. It is pain.” But if we practice the kind of unflinching self-reflection that Meghan O’Gieblyn performs in her ravishing new memoir Will and Attention, then a hard-won peace is also possible. 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

 “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

“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

“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

“Will and Attention had an immediate and profound effect on me. I have not stopped thinking about it since, both as a source of comfort and one of inspiration - it seems to offer both salves at once. I found it astonishing.” — Lamorna Ash

“Oof! It's as if I've just watched a shadowboxing match between discipline & discipleship, between will & the search for wholeness. Meghan O'Gieblyn has written the strangest, most lyrical, imminently engrossing memoir-cum-poetics of doubt & self-learning.”
—Anna Badkhen

“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

"A remarkable memoir. . . . brave in its disclosures but more so in its demands, its spiritual rigor, and its ardent intellectualism." — James Wood, The New Yorker