Will and Attention

'I was instantly helpless before Will and Attention ... a cool-water baptism, so bracing I felt transformed' Jia TolentinoIn her late thirties, Meghan O'Gieblyn found herself in crisis. After many years away from the evangelical Christianity of her childhood, she had begun secretly attending Catholic mass and meeting with a priest to discuss conversion. Then, after eleven years of sobriety, she had begun drinking again.Both of these returns - to organised religion and to addiction - happened in secret, hidden from everyone close to her, and both felt like personal defeat. This fundamentally unsettled her belief that she was a unified self with transparent motives. Can we truly master our will, or are we always divided selves? And can we ever satisfy the deep yearning our compulsions speak to?Soon after her return to sobriety, Meghan looked to a series of spiritual texts for answers and began putting them in conversation with her life. She was struck by the words of philosopher and mystic Simone Weil: "We have to try to cure our faults by attention and not by will." Will had certainly failed her; perhaps the answer lay in attention to her wandering mind and heart? Inspired by this possibility, she set out to find a spirituality that could meet her longings and prove capacious enough to hold the shadowy side of human nature.Written with bracing honesty and glowing intellect, Will and Attention is a shatteringly beautiful memoir about darkness, recovery and how to live. 'I savoured 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, author of Girlhood