Many recovering alcoholics will tell you that drinking was just a symptom of their disease. Under all the character defects, the self-will, and the denial was a hole they were trying to fill one drink at a time—what many in recovery call a “God-sized hole.” In Meghan O’Gieblyn’s new memoir, Will and Attention (Doubleday 2026), she chronicles how the desire to fill this hole with Catholicism and “the Truth” led to a relapse after eleven years of sobriety. What followed was a year of drinking in secret, isolation, and a return to a version of herself she thought she had conquered. In Will and Attention, O’Gieblyn sets out to not only understand where she went wrong, but to find a spirituality that will give her a way forward.
O’Gieblyn’s story starts innocently enough with attending Catholic mass. The fact that alarms weren’t raised when she hid it from her husband and returned to organized religion after renouncing her evangelical Protestant upbringing shows the duplicitous nature of addiction. In seeking to lose herself to something greater, she also lost her connection to Twelve Step recovery.
As someone in recovery, I completely identify with O’Gieblyn’s desire for something more. Even after seventeen years of sobriety I can’t shake the belief that more is always better. But as O’Gieblyn demonstrates in her memoir, the problem with desire is that it is endless. When the Catholic Church can’t give her the surrender and loss of self she craves, she returns to drinking—the one thing “that has ever allowed [her] to rest happily in the presence of God.”
After everything falls apart, O’Gieblyn tries to piece her life back together with the guiding words of Simone Weil, Iris Murdoch, St. Augustine, Jung, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and a host of others. Both deeply personal and philosophical, Will and Attention, is a moving first-hand account of addiction, doubt, and the power of narrative to both deceive and help us know ourselves more fully.
I had the pleasure of speaking with O’Gieblyn over Zoom and email, where we discussed the challenge of writing about her life from the middle of the story, the benefits and pitfalls of wanting to understand, and the paradoxical nature of alcoholism and spirituality.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
The Rumpus: What I found really interesting about the memoir is that it’s written from a place of curiosity rather than authority, both when looking at your life and the relapse. But even with the Simone Weil quote—“We have to cure our faults by attention and not by will”— that gives the book its title and structure, do you usually start from a place of seeking understanding when you’re writing?
Meghan O’Gieblyn: I think there’s something really powerful about first-person writing that begins with either a state of confusion or ambivalence—being conflicted about something. I began this book shortly after I came back from a relapse, after having been sober for eleven years. I didn’t realize at first that it was a book. It started with notes I was taking about things I was reading. I didn’t feel like I had the authority to speak about any of these ideas, which I was still trying to understand. I didn’t even understand myself, which is the central subject of any memoir.
I had also become skeptical, more broadly, of this stance of authority that is bound up with the memoir as a form, going back to Augustine’s Confessions, where there’s this formula of, “I was lost and I’m found,” or “I’m sick and now I’m well,” and requires speaking from the position of some imaginary new life from which you can see all of your follies with perspective and wisdom. That’s not where I was. I was in the muddled middle of things and did not have that kind of perspective. It was a completely different writing process compared to some of the writing I’ve done about my experience leaving Christianity, for example, where I’m looking back on it from the distance of a decade or so. It ultimately just meant trying to find a different form for the book, one that was a bit more circular and recursive as opposed to linear.
Rumpus: Something you bring up in the memoir is that facts are always changing. Was this recursiveness part of the process—of both reprocessing the facts but also processing the process?
O’Gieblyn: I’m interested in all the different ways that a story can be told. So much of the book is about having a divided self, where there’s part of you who wants higher things and another part that wants more immediate, possibly destructive things. Both of those selves entered into the writing process, such that I felt like I was constantly going back and revising and reworking things because it only had one perspective in it and I needed the balance of both.
There were some passages, especially early on, where it felt like I was buying into some of the delusions that had characterized my alcoholism: This idea that drinking was dramatic and dangerous and interesting. It was important to put those ideas in the book because those beliefs, deluded as they are, were part of my experience. But then I also found myself going back and calibrating those passages by adding a more distant perspective, one that recognized that those were lies I was telling myself.
Rumpus: This search for truth comes out in many ways throughout the memoir. When you were writing, you were presumably writing for an audience. And so I imagine you want the book to be interesting, but you also want it to be truthful. Not to say that those two things can’t coexist. How do you grapple with those two potentially opposing forces?
O’Gieblyn: It was a question I was thinking about a lot during the writing process. One of the tricky things about the book is that I was dealing with these writers, like Simone Weil and Iris Murdoch, who had a very Platonic idea of “Truth,” with a capital T, as in something real that’s out there in the world and that we have to try to attune ourselves to it. Whereas our typical contemporary view is that truth is a linguistic construct, that it’s relative, that there are many truths. I came up against that tension as I was trying to write about something very small, which was the truth about myself. I did feel, despite all the doubleness and multiplicity, that there was a definitive truth about myself, if only because I’d experienced its opposite: There were moments associated with my addiction where I was very clearly living in untruth—when I was lying to myself; when I was living in delusion and fantasy.
In terms of the private and public thing you asked about: Something I think about a lot is the difference between sincerity and truth. I’ve been involved in the creative writing community for a long time—I teach writing workshops—and one of the things you hear often is, “Be sincere. Try to just be as honest as you can.” The authenticity will carry the piece. The thing that terrified me is that I could be as sincere as possible about my experience, but the reader is still going to see moments where I’m lying to myself.
Writing in public is such a scary thing. There was fear during the whole writing process about how my actions and insights would be perceived. But I also felt that this was a necessary form of accountability, writing before the moral gaze of another person. I wasn’t just trying to speak my truth the way that I would in a journal; I was trying to write something that was convincing, that was rigorous, which meant interrogating myself the way that I imagined an objective reader would. It’s not possible to do this perfectly, of course. People are going to have their own thoughts about the book that are impossible to anticipate or control. But I did feel that this was an important discipline during the writing.
Rumpus: There’s a lineage of confession in Catholicism and AA. The belief that there is something powerful about having a witness beyond our own self-recognition. How does that manifest itself when you’re not sitting there with somebody as you write? Do you have an imagined audience?
O’Gieblyn: I love that connection between confession and writing. On one hand, personal writing is often rightly called confessional because there’s this very intimate sense of whispering, or confiding, your sins to one person, one ideal reader.
On the other hand, I grew up Protestant and evangelical, and we had this completely different narrative form called “giving testimony.” This is where you stand up and tell your life story in front of a gathered community, a church congregation, or at a tent meeting revival. The idea is not that you’re trying to unburden yourself, but that you’re serving as a witness to the truth, speaking about how your experience has brought you to some sort of insight that other people can identify with. I often think about the twelve-step practice of giving leads, of telling your story, as being closer to testimony.
In terms of the book, I felt myself vacillating between those two modes. On one hand, there are parts of the book that are very confessional. I know that term gets a bad rap, but I write things in this book that I have only told to close friends—or in some cases, things I hadn’t told anyone before writing them down. Those parts feel very intimate, and I did have to imagine a sympathetic reader. Other parts of the book feel more in tune with giving testimony. But it’s for this very specific purpose, to bear witness to truth, or perhaps to help other people who’ve experienced similar things.
Rumpus: Throughout the book you weave an analysis of “attention” as you find different definitions and usages throughout time. Simone Weil has a pretty specific idea of what “attention” is—losing yourself in a thing until the “I” disappears. Recovery is paradoxical in a sense because your attention is focused solely on yourself and all the ways you have to change. One of the ways to change yourself is to focus on other people. It is a form of attention that seems antithetical to what Weil is talking about.
O’Gieblyn: This is what confused me most about Weil’s writing about attention. On one hand, she says you need to pay attention to yourself and your thoughts—and to your faults, especially. She says you should continually measure the distance between what you are and what you love. She wrote this great essay about attention in an academic context and how, when you get feedback from a teacher saying that an essay is second rate or that you’ve messed up a math problem, the first instinct is to turn away from that criticism, or justify it. But we actually have to look and contemplate our faults if we want to get better. On the other hand, she says elsewhere that we have to pay attention to the point where the “I” disappears. Attention, in that second sense, is a process of self-emptying where you have to completely demolish your ego—she called it “de-creating” your ego—in order to fully give your attention to something.
I struggled with these two forms of attention because they seem so contradictory. It’s like, “Well, should I be forgetting myself or paying more attention to myself?” Weil loved spiritual paradoxes. And like a lot of spiritual paradoxes, there’s a way in which these two types of attention are two avenues toward the same end. I think attention for her was ultimately a way to cultivate humility. One way to do that is by looking at yourself and your failings (I know we don’t like that word, “failings,” today—but let’s say your patterns of behavior, the burdens you’d like to be liberated from). It’s a way to remember that you’re not perfect. The other way toward humility is to give your attention to something else, to a beautiful object, an ideal, to a person who’s suffering, which is capable of momentarily shutting down the ego.
In my experience, a lot of spiritual practices ask you to do both. One of the things that was really helpful for me when I came into recovery communities was this idea that if you are in your head and suffering about something, call someone else and ask them how they’re doing. Or see if you can help someone else who’s going through a hard time. That worked so well and still works in my life today.
As far as the more inward-looking attention, writing and journaling is something I do fairly regularly, along with disciplines like a nightly review. This is a practice the Stoics developed, where you review your day, before you go to bed, and ask yourself: “Where was I dishonest? Where did my passions get the better of me? Where was I angry?”
The point is that all of this work is oriented toward the same end; it’s two sides of the same coin.
Rumpus: The idea of looking in to look out—it makes me think of my own experience with having a Higher Power. You talk about it in the book, how God is in me, but also outside of me. For me, at least, my Higher Power’s voice sounds just like my voice. There’s this constant question of “Whose will is this?” There’s the desire to give oneself over completely, but when you have doubt about whose voice it is because you find yourself untrustworthy, it’s a really complicated way to live sometimes.
O’Gieblyn: I know. It’s something that is often overlooked by people who don’t have a lot of direct experience with religion. I often hear people say that religion is about certainty and easy answers and a deluded sense of security. In my experience, self-doubt is such a central part of the spiritual life. Because you ultimately don’t know if you’re being led by something that’s good or evil, by God, or by the devil, or your own sinful nature.
That was my experience when I was growing up Christian. There was this constant anxiety about my own inclinations. And that uncertainty is also present (maybe even more so) in addiction, which makes the basic act of trusting oneself such a fraught endeavor. You have a parasite in your brain, essentially, that wants you dead, that wants you to consume poison. And this voice is extremely sophisticated and savvy and can often disguise itself as your higher self. This was one of the scariest things for me when I relapsed, after eleven years of sobriety. I would think that I was doing something for completely good reasons, like choosing a late morning return flight, as opposed to an early one, when booking a work trip. I had all sorts of sensible reasons for doing this—I’ll avoid rush-hour traffic, I can eat breakfast at the hotel, et cetera—but then it turned out that I was secretly planning my next drink and some part of me knew that I’d be too hung over the next day to get up early. But I wouldn’t realize this until after it happened.
The notion of surrendering to something larger than myself has always been really tricky. It requires letting your guard down, and there’s this persistent question: If I let go of my vigilance and allow some other force to step in—even if it’s my unconscious—how do I know that it wants what’s good for me? In a spiritual context, surrendering to God or a higher power allows for this remarkable experience of relief and wholeness, where the warring inside of you is put to rest. At the same time, that’s precisely what alcohol did for me.
Rumpus: I was really taken by a quote from Jung that came from your therapist: “In the symptom lies the cure.” I’ve been thinking about that a lot because the experiences on both sides of active addiction and recovery are very contradictory. When I was doing the most harm to myself I was the most confident. And then when I was doing the right thing, I was the least confident. You capture what it’s like to not be able to trust your own thoughts because they are slippery.
O’Gieblyn: That’s so true about being confident when you’re doing the worst things, and full of doubt when you’re choosing the good. If anything, putting oneself on the moral path makes you more acutely aware of your own faults and failings. I started writing this book because I earnestly wanted to escape the doubleness and the self-criticism and the doubt that I’ve suffered from for most of my life. By the end of the writing process, though, I realized this doubleness, which is to say this dialogue with oneself, is necessary. It’s a requisite condition for a moral life. You can occasionally escape that second self through transcendent spiritual experiences, but those are very rare and short-lived. You can also reach that sense of equanimity by turning off your brain. I’m thinking about what Hannah Arendt wrote about Adolf Eichmann, how he refused to interrogate himself and exercise his conscience, and instead just deferred to bureaucratic cliches to avoid the hard work of thinking. You can do the same thing through intoxication. There’s all these different ways of putting an end to that inner dialogue.
Doubleness and inner dialogue is part of the human condition. And it’s beautiful, in a way. One of the things that distinguishes us from both animals and machines is that we have self-awareness; we not only have desires, but we have the capacity to desire different desires. We can question ourselves and ask whether our inclinations are truly good.
Rumpus: You write early in the memoir that one thing you can’t renounce is the need to understand. I can see in your writing that you’re constantly trying to understand. In this instance it is to try to understand what you experienced and what you’re supposed to do next. I got the impression you were constantly reading different things along the way that seemed relevant to what you were going through. Is it common for you to seek, maybe not capital T truth, but an understanding you feel comfortable with?
O’Gieblyn: My default orientation toward the world is to try to find answers to life’s questions, and my personal problems, in books. It’s not an entirely healthy or rational impulse. For one thing, it’s totally an act of will. I tell myself sometimes that it’s an act of attention, that I’m devoting my mind toward all these different texts—and sometimes, it is more of a receptive process. But there’s still this underlying delusion that instrumental knowledge is going to solve the problem. When I know from experience that whatever knowledge I had about alcoholism did not stop me from drinking. There was always this strange disconnect between my understanding and my actions.
I love reading, and I love writing. I love the puzzle of writing, of trying to make sense of something. But lately I’ve been trying to do that with a little distance, and some awareness, where I can treat it like a fun game, a kind of play. Maybe I’ll arrive at an insight here or there. But the things that are really valuable in life are not going to be figured out on this purely intellectual plane. They’re going to be figured out in the realm of experience. The most important things that I need to remember on a daily basis are very, very simple, and don’t need to be hashed out exhaustively, the way that I do when I’m working on a book.
Rumpus: This “play” you talk about, or at least the willingness to see where things go, is a real attribute in your memoir. If one were to get through this ordeal and then look back and write about it, this story probably wouldn’t unfold in the way you tell it. Your memoir is almost diaristic rather than following a traditional arc. I’m thinking of your trip to the think tank in Italy and how so many great insights came out of that experience. But I don’t know if that would have been included in a traditional redemption story. What you were just talking about, the importance of experience, was really highlighted during that Italy trip: There is this certain kind of knowing that you can only get through experience, that no one can refute, even though we can’t say scientifically that something is true. That’s such an asset of the memoir as an art form. And it relates so much to alcoholism and spirituality.
O’Gieblyn: I’ve been keeping private journals for years, where I write down things that happened to me that day or that week—funny conversations I had, or things I observe at conferences or literary events. I’ll take notes about it afterwards, just to have a record of that time. When I was writing this book, it occurred to me, kind of late in the process, that it was becoming such a claustrophobic, interior book; it’s just me reading things at my desk and thinking. I needed more of the world in the book, more breathing room, more scenes. I ended up going through some of my journals and experimented with integrating an occasional scene, for color or for illustration. And, of course, a lot of the passages from my journals ended up lining up, in unexpected ways, with what I was writing about. Or sometimes I’d put something in on sheer intuition, without knowing what its purpose was, or being able to explain it to myself. There’s a scene at the end [of the book] about watching some cliff divers in Italy. I knew that it had something to do with willpower, but I didn’t want to articulate it, or risk overexplaining it. I put it in the book, and I don’t really articulate its purpose in the book either, but it felt right for that last movement of the story.
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