Will and Attention by Meghan O’Gieblyn

Meghan O’Gieblyn discusses addiction, faith, and moral aspiration in her acclaimed memoir Will and Attention with editor Gerald Howard.

In her new memoir, Will and Attention, prize-winning author Meghan O’Gieblyn recounts her experience with addiction and religious devotion, periodically returning to a line by the philosopher Simone Weil: “We have to try to cure our faults by attention and not by will.” O’Gieblyn strives to understand the circular nature of moral aspiration and the elusive nature of our power over ourselves. Written with sparkling intellect and searching rigor, the book is both a personal reckoning and a philosophical inquiry that has been called “one of the best memoirs of the decade” (Jia Tolentino). O’Gieblyn will appear in conversation with Gerald Howard, longtime editor and author of The Insider: Malcolm Cowley and the Triumph of American Literature.