Praise for Will and Attention
“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, bestselling 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, award-winning 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, New York Times-bestselling author of The Immortalists and The Anatomy of Dreams
“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, New York Times-bestselling author of Beautiful Country
“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, finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award
“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, 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
