Meghan O’Gieblyn’s “Will and Attention” Maps Sobriety, Faith, and the Theology of Drink
In her memoir “Will and Attention,” released by Doubleday, Meghan O’Gieblyn shares her journey of relapsing into alcohol consumption during the pandemic after maintaining sobriety for over ten years, alongside a return to organized religion. Growing up in a fundamentalist Christian environment, O’Gieblyn attended the Moody Bible Institute but abandoned her faith in her twenties. At the age of twenty-eight, she sought treatment for alcoholism while living out of her car. In 2018, she began attending Mass at St. Mary’s Catholic Church, which she later recognized as a trigger for her drinking. Her relapse in 2021, spurred by book-related travel, ended with a confession to her husband, Barrett. The memoir wraps up in Italy, highlighting her renewed commitment to sobriety and focus on positivity.
Key facts
- “Will and Attention” is published by Doubleday.
- O’Gieblyn was raised in a fundamentalist Christian community on Lake Michigan and studied at the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago.
- She began treatment for alcoholism at twenty-eight while living out of her car.
- The title comes from a line in Simone Weil’s “Gravity and Grace”: “We have to try to cure our faults by attention and not by will.”
- In 2018 she started attending Mass at St. Mary’s, a Catholic church she calls “a large and beautiful church on our side of town.”
- She kept her church attendance secret from her husband, Barrett, and stopped going to recovery meetings.
- Her relapse began during the pandemic and continued in 2021 during book travel, including drinking in Helsinki and at O’Hare.
- She writes that alcohol is “the only thing that has ever allowed me to rest happily in the presence of God.”
Entities
Artists
- Meghan O’Gieblyn
- Simone Weil
- Iris Murdoch
- C. S. Lewis
- Emma Bovary
- Gustave Flaubert
- Barrett
- Father Aaron
Institutions
- Doubleday
- Moody Bible Institute
- St. Mary’s
- The New Yorker
Locations
- Lake Michigan
- Chicago
- Helsinki
- Finland
- O’Hare
- Nashville
- Italy
- United States