Meghan O'Gieblyn.
In her new book, Will and Attention: A Memoir (Doubleday), Meghan O’Gieblyn never mentions that she lives in Madison — or, for that matter, Wisconsin. Instead, she refers obliquely to being in “a Midwestern city,” “a Midwestern swing state” and “a blue city nestled within a sea of red.” This distancing was done, she tells Isthmus, in hopes of “acknowledging the backdrop of my life without getting too bogged down in particulars,” and not as a diss on our fair city, where she has lived most of the time since 2010, when she arrived to attend graduate school at UW-Madison.
“This is home to me now,” says O’Gieblyn (pronounced Oh-gib-lin) in an interview. “It’s the place I’ve lived longest in my adult life, and I love the community here. I’ve got really good friendships here and I don’t know of a better place to live than Madison.”
Madison, in turn, may not have a better writer than Meghan O’Gieblyn. In two prior books and numerous articles and essays for legacy publications including Harper’s, The New Yorker, Wired, The New York Review of Books, The Guardian and The New York Times, she has emerged as an exceptionally thoughtful ponderer of, broadly, what it means to be human.
O’Gieblyn’s first book, a collection of essays called Interior States (2018), explored how she lost her faith after having grown up in an evangelical church and studied theology at the Moody Bible Institute. Her second book, God, Human, Animal, Machine (2021) was about how, as she puts it, “technology had become the new dominant ideology” — the thing that was “going to save us” but may very well replace us.
And now there’s Will and Attention (release date Oct. 6), which O’Gieblyn calls “a behind-the-scenes glimpse into the personal questions that were preoccupying me while I was writing the other two books.” It recounts her relapse into secret drinking after 11 years of sobriety, as well as her equally clandestine return to religion, which for her proved perilous.
O’Gieblyn agrees that religion can play a positive role in some people’s lives, just as alcohol is something some people can enjoy in moderation. But during the year she was attending Catholic Mass, she writes, “I abandoned the recovery community that had been so fundamental to my new life. Some other desire landed in my lap, a desire for God, for mystery, for the subsuming darkness and beauty of the chapel.” It was “just a veiled desire for intoxication [and] served as a gateway back into drinking.”
Will and Attention is a brave book, in which O’Gieblyn confronts her addiction and the destructive impact it has had on her life. She notes in the interview that “one of the baffling things about addiction is why people continue to seek this one thing that is making their life miserable.”
O’Gieblyn is now again in recovery and attending a 12-step program, as she keeps trying to make sense of her experience. To this end, she probes the writing of Simone Weil (pronounced Vay), an early 20th century French philosopher, who stated in a quote that O’Gieblyn has kept for years on an index card above her desk: “We have to try to cure our faults by attention and not by will.” In other words, being observant and open is more useful than seeking to direct outcomes through force of will power.
“Weil says that when you’re trying to get something, when you’re willing, when you’re trying to grasp, you can’t really see,” says O’Gieblyn. “And in order to overcome a persistent temptation in your life, you have to stop grabbing and start looking.” O’Gieblyn sees in Weil’s writing the possibility of a kind of faith that is not “transactional” — say your prayers, get your miracles — but nonetheless allows for recognition of “some sort of higher intelligence in the world.” She hopes her book will help others “feel less lonely” by recognizing “that we’re all in these struggles together” and no one has all the answers.
As O’Gieblyn writes in Will and Attention, “You cannot wield truth as an instrument of the will any more than you can bottle sunlight or hold grace in the palm of your hand. You can only live humbly in the pursuit of the light by attending to your quality of vision, so that you are not deceived about what is actually light.”
Meghan O’Gieblyn will appear on Oct. 16, in discussion with Elizabeth Ames Staudt.
