{"product_id":"will-and-attention-a-memoir","title":"Will and Attention: A Memoir","description":"\u003cp\u003eIn her exquisite memoir of secret drinking, fragile recovery, and the deep pull of religion, award-winning essayist Meghan O’Gieblyn seeks to understand why it is so hard to sustain the difficult work of personal change.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAfter leaving evangelical Christianity in her early twenties, kicking an addiction, and building a life as a writer, Meghan O’Gieblyn was admired by her friends for having a strong will. Then, in her late thirties, she began secretly attending Catholic mass and meeting with a priest to discuss conversion. After eleven years of sobriety, she began drinking again. Both returns—to organized religion and to alcohol—felt to her like a regression, a personal defeat. Knowledge and determination had proven useless when it came to her most vexing personal battles. She was forced to reckon with her inner doubleness, a self “who both wants and wants not to want,” as she puts it.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn Will and Attention O’Gieblyn captures those perplexing days. Soon after her return to sobriety, she turned to a series of spiritual texts—by Simone Weil, Iris Murdoch, the Desert Fathers—and began putting them in conversation with her life. She set out to find a spirituality that could meet her longings and prove capacious enough to hold the dark side of human nature. Beautifully written, intellectually sparkling, wryly funny, this memoir from a beloved essayist explores a fundamental question of being human: the mystifying nature of our power over ourselves.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Fable \u0026 Craft Co.","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":50622305698009,"sku":"9780385551571","price":30.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0783\/5883\/9513\/files\/9780385551571.jpg?v=1791387421","url":"https:\/\/fableandcraft.co\/products\/will-and-attention-a-memoir","provider":"Fable \u0026 Craft Co.","version":"1.0","type":"link"}