From Addiction to a Godless Grace with Meghan O’Gieblyn

Where do you turn when your life falls apart? When you’re stuck in shame and despair? Essayist Meghan O’Gieblyn worked through her own crisis with the help of an unusual guide: the French philosopher and mystic Simone Weil.

In her searing memoir "Will and Attention," O’Gieblyn tells the story of her "double midlife crisis" — a relapse into drinking after 11 years of sobriety and a failed attempt to become Catholic. Raised Evangelical, she left the church long ago, and her life since has been a kind of spiritual quest for deeper answers than religion gave her. In this conversation, O’Gieblyn recounts her struggle with a nearly fatal addiction, her recovery, and a gnawing spiritual angst. Her honesty is bracing, at times almost uncomfortably so, as she describes the allure of drinking and the secret life she hid from family and friends. “I knew that it was bad and that it made me unhappy,” she says. “But I did it anyway.”

To sort through it all, O’Gieblyn turns to philosophy. She wrestles with Nietzsche, William James, and Iris Murdoch, along with Weil, who helped her understand why her willpower kept failing her and how “attention,” as Weil described it, offered a path forward. The book blends personal, almost confessional writing with rigorous inquiry, the qualities that drew readers to her previous books, "Interior States" and "God, Human, Animal, Machine."

Along the way O’Gieblyn confronts big existential questions. How do we find meaning in our lives? Why should we be good? How can we reckon with a divided self “who both wants and wants not to want”? And how can beauty be a guide for living?

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00:00:00 Introduction
00:02:10 Simone Weil and Failed Willpower
00:09:04 Evangelical Roots, Divided Self
00:23:16 Relapse and the Pull of Mass
00:33:26 Beauty, Wonder, and Testimony

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• Personal website
• Book: "Will and Attention"
• New Yorker: “Is Will Power Overrated?” 
• New York Review of Books: “Wishing It So” 
• New Yorker: James Wood’s review of “Will and Attention”

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Wonder Cabinet is hosted by Anne Strainchamps and Steve Paulson. Find out more about the show at https://wondercabinetproductions.com, where you can subscribe to the podcast and our newsletter.