WILL AND ATTENTION

A recovering alcoholic and former evangelical Christian undergoes a spiritual crisis.

O’Gieblyn grew up in an ultra-religious family in rural Michigan, went to a Bible college to become a minister, and, within two years, lost her faith in God. She found this collapse of belief more traumatic than liberating, and, around the same time, she began drinking to excess, eventually becoming sober via the 12-step program. The events of this novelistic memoir take place after years of sobriety, during which time the author developed a dual career in academia and as a writer whose subject was the politics of Christianity and its intersection with technological transhumanism in 21st-century America. O’Gieblyn had what some might call a midlife crisis that she astutely self-diagnoses as “metaphysical boredom.” Without telling her husband or friends, she came within inches of converting to Catholicism and only laid on the brakes when she realized she was expected to give up birth control and start having children to be a Catholic in good standing. Like an echo of the past, this failure to connect with organized religion led to a yearlong relapse into drinking, which she also managed to keep secret until, mercifully, she confessed to her husband and was offered immediate grace. The memoir doesn’t end there. O’Gieblyn is inspired by broad, perceptive reading in philosophy, religion, and literature—and, in particular, by the French philosopher and mystic Simone Weil, whose aphorism, “We have to try to cure our faults by attention and not by will,” gives the book its title. O’Gieblyn uses her lapses to do some exhilaratingly deep thinking about the meaning and purpose of her life.

A novelistic, thrillingly confessional memoir.