With God, Human, Animal, Machine, Meghan O'Gieblyn emerged as the rare tech writer willing to explore the intersections of religion, humanity, and artificial intelligence. In Will and Attention, she continues in that vein, this time turning her keen intelligence and earnest exploration on herself and the two devastating relapses in her life. "There are a million ways to sabotage one's life," she explains, "but I could not seem to come up with anything more original than the things that had ruined my life before: alcohol and institutional religion."
Sober for 11 years, O'Gieblyn did not see the danger in secretly attending Mass despite having long renounced the evangelical faith in which she was raised. She merely recognized the spiritual longing that the rituals of the church seemed to answer: "I knew only that I had to kneel before a beautiful object, to be swallowed up by darkness, to forget myself." When her husband found out, however, he pushed her to see the deception as "addict behavior," a prescient warning that O'Gieblyn was powerless to heed as she turned her questioning mind away from religion and toward what at first felt like merely "idle fantasies" of drinking in a bar. Those hypotheticals eventually shifted into reality, and it wasn't merely "what people in recovery communities charitably call a 'slip.' I drank for almost a year in secret." After she was finally discovered, initial relief turned quickly to dismay as she was forced to renegotiate all the truths she had built her sobriety upon.
O'Gieblyn explores the ideas of philosopher Simone Weil, building her book around a passage she tacked above her writing desk: "We have to try to cure our faults by attention and not by will." Divided into two sections mirroring her title, Will and Attention takes readers on an intellectual journey as O'Gieblyn attempts to reconfigure the narratives of her life and her recovery, to master her divided will and conflicting desires. "I would not be writing this if I did not harbor some hope that the reconciliation that has long eluded me in life might be worked out here--that the self that cannot be made whole in reality might become so on the page." O'Gieblyn succeeds, telling her story with stunning clarity, cutting easily through complex concepts and draping every scene in color, light, and motion. A moving and astute examination of addiction, longing, and grace, Will and Attention is deeply worthy of readers' attention. --Sara Beth West, freelance reviewer and librarian
Shelf Talker: A moving and intelligent examination of addiction, longing, and grace, Will and Attention is a recovery memoir worthy of readers' attention.