Will and Attention
A memoir of addiction and recovery from award-winning writer
$29.75
- Paperback
288 pages
- Release Date
13 October 2026
Summary
‘Mesmerizing’ Claire Vaye Watkins, author of *I Love You but I’ve Chosen Darkness*
‘Staggering’ Keiran Goddard, author of *I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning*
‘Profound’ Chloe Benjamin, author of *Under Story*
In her late thirties, Meghan O’Gieblyn found herself in crisis. Earlier that year, she had relapsed back into an alcohol addiction she had kicked in her twenties. The year before that, she had been briefly drawn…
Book Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780349149424 |
|---|---|
| ISBN-10: | 0349149429 |
| Author: | Meghan O'Gieblyn |
| Publisher: | Little, Brown Book Group |
| Imprint: | Abacus |
| Format: | Paperback |
| Number of Pages: | 288 |
| Release Date: | 13 October 2026 |
| Weight: | 505g |
| Dimensions: | 22mm x 135mm x 216mm |
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Critics Review
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
I was instantly helpless before Meghan O’Gieblyn’s Will and Attention, which spoke with a kind of flaying clarity and graceful consolation to a set of questions about worth, depravity, intention, and practice that scaffold my entire experience of the world. O’Gieblyn brings profound rigor to an examination of terrifying malleability; she is philosophically unrestricted while being uncompromising in her honesty about confusion and doubt. This is one of the best memoirs of the decade - a cool-water baptism, so bracing I felt transformed – Jia Tolentino, New Yorker culture critic and author of Trick Mirror
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. A bracing, beautiful book that reads like a fortifying talk with an intimate companion. Mesmerizing, invigorating, and profound
– Claire Vaye Watkins, author of I Love You but I’ve Chosen DarknessStaggering. 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
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, author of Under Story
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
Will and Attention had an immediate and profound effect on me. I have not stopped thinking about it since, both as a source of comfort and one of inspiration - it seems to offer both salves at once. I found it astonishing – Lamorna Ash, author of Don’t Forget We’re Here Forever
Meghan O'Gieblyn
Meghan O’Gieblyn’s writing has appeared in Harper’s Magazine, The New Yorker, n+1, The Point, The Baffler, Wired, The New York Review of Books, The Guardian, and The New York Times, among other publications. Her first book, Interior States, won the 2018 Believer Book Award for nonfiction, and her second, God, Human, Animal, Machine, was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Science & Technology.
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