Will and Attention

'One of the best memoirs of the decade' Jia Tolentino'Brilliant' Lorrie Moore'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 StoryIn 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 back to the faith she had renounced decades earlier, through a friendship she developed with a Catholic priest. Both of these events happened in secret, hidden from everyone close to her, and both felt like acts of regression - a return to paths she had walked before. This fundamentally unsettled her belief that she was a unified self with transparent motives. How is a person to avoid those irrational mistakes that they continually return to, despite knowing they are harmful? Can we truly master our will, or are we always divided selves? And can we ever satisfy the deep yearning our compulsions speak to?

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, The New York Times and 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.