In ‘Will and Attention,’ Meghan O’Gieblyn (BA ’06) grapples with faith, recovery
October 30, 2026
Share
In her late 30s, writer Meghan O’Gieblyn (BA ’06) found herself returning to two facets of her life which she left behind long ago. First, O’Gieblyn—who was raised as an evangelical Protestant but left the faith in her 20s—began to secretly attend Catholic Mass, eventually taking steps to formally convert. Subsequently, she began drinking again after 11 years of sobriety. These twin unexpected regressions form the centerpiece of her forthcoming memoir, Will and Attention, available now.
Will and Attention does not slot neatly into the crowded genre of recovery memoirs. A work that is in deep communion with spiritual and philosophical texts, including those by C.S. Lewis, Iris Murdoch, and, particularly, the early 20th century French philosopher and ascetic Simone Weil (the title itself is an homage to Weil’s essay “Attention and Will”), counterposed with O’Gieblyn’s own story of searching and secrecy, forms a framework for contending with questions which are, at the same time, fundamental and difficult. What is it in us that makes us pursue the inadvertent? What do we do when we become alienated from who we are, or who we thought we were?
Loyola Today spoke to O’Gieblyn about Will and Attention and her novel approach to the form of the memoir.
This book is deeply rooted in a personal narrative, but it is so much more than that; do you consider it to be a memoir?
When I was writing it, I was thinking of it as a biblio-memoir, which is a subgenre where a writer writes about their experience with the text. It is in some ways a recovery memoir, and in some ways a spiritual autobiography. And I think whenever you’re engaging with a form of that kind, the challenge is to find a new way into it and to not just tell the same story that everybody’s telling. My experience with addiction is not particularly novel; I think anybody who’s gone through these experiences and had this struggle against themselves will recognize a lot of stuff that’s familiar in the autobiographical passages. And the thing that I thought I could possibly add to that conversation were these other writers who were not specifically writing about addiction.
Simone Weil is such a central figure in this book, and I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about what your entry into her work was and why it resonates with you to such an extent.
I first came to her through her political writing, and I read Oppression and Liberty. I think that was I was really interested, initially, in her ideas about technology and automation. She was somebody who worked in factories in the 1930s in France and was really interested in this idea that society, as a whole, was becoming this mindless machine, through bureaucratic practices, through outsourcing things to mathematical processes. And if you read some of her writing, her political and cultural commentary from that era, it almost sounds almost like she’s talking about AI. She had this fear that, at a certain point, nobody in society’s going to understand what we’re doing anymore. My last book was about technology, and so I was reading her among a bunch of other thinkers, and interested in that dimension of her work. During the pandemic when I returned to Gravity and Grace, which is a compilation of spiritual writing that she wrote in her private journals. A piece in there is called “Attention and Will,” and its main thesis statement is that we have to try to cure our faults with attention and not by will. And this idea of the futility of the will was something that was deeply familiar to me already, both from my evangelical upbringing, which was very much focused on surrendering one’s will to God, and also through my history in 12 step programs, which was skeptical of willpower. So I really wanted to understand, what does it mean to have attention in a spiritual sense? Is there a kind of attention that’s different than the kind of intense focus that we’re often trained to sustain in modern life, and how can attention possibly be an antidote to willpower, and something that actually works more effectively when it comes to spiritual problems, as opposed to barely external objects or obstacles in the world?
So much of Will and Attention is about reasoning through one’s own spirituality and the works of religious thinkers. Did your experience at Loyola inform the way in which you approach these texts?
I came to Loyola to study literature, and it was really in my classes there that I was introduced to this entirely different way of reading, a text, which was not about finding out the authoritative meaning, it was about of expanding the meaning of a text, and seeing what was in between the lines, beyond what the author intended and treating a text as suspect, as open to myriad readings. I had fantastic professors there, including Pamela Caughie and David Chinitz who really just opened up this entirely different way of approaching texts.
What works would you recommend to readers that are new to the genre of the biblio-memoir?
Some memoirs that I read and was thinking about during this process: Rebecca Solnit has a great book called Orwell’s Roses; Heather Crystal wrote a great memoir about Virginia Woolf that was published, I believe, last year, called In the Rhododendrons; Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling with D. H. Lawrence by Geoff Dyer. I think it’s a fantastic genre.
