The most popular religious memoirs of the past few decades have followed a similar arc. In Tara Westover’s “Educated,” Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s “Infidel” and Deborah Feldman’s “Unorthodox,” each of the authors grew up in high-demand religions, sustained some form of trauma and did the hard work of confronting their families. Then they left.
It’s a neat, emancipatory story. But an exit is rarely that simple. After, the formerly religious are forced to wrestle with grief and build something new. That process can be arduous and excavating. The promised freedom can be illusory. It seems to lie at the center of an unsolvable maze.
O’Gieblyn’s memoir is about stumbling through the hedges. She grew up evangelical in the Midwest and attended a small Bible college. After she left her church, her life devolved into an alcoholism that threatened to destroy her. She got sober, got married and made a successful career for herself as a writer. Then she returned — to both religion and drinking.
She did so in secret, and her life became a brief, gorgeous lie. “What I remember most clearly is the intensity of my desire,” she writes, “the profound longing to lose myself in the rituals of Mass or the stupefied void of a blackout, and the utter conviction that these things were right, even as some part of me must have known they were wrong.”
O’Gieblyn doesn’t end up converting to Catholicism, and she does get sober for a second time. The book’s recursive, reflexive structure insists that lives are not linear, that certainty is a vice and that control is a delusion.
The book is oriented around a quote from the French philosopher Simone Weil: “We have to try to cure our faults by attention and not by will.” In her memoir, O’Gieblyn explores the limits of willpower, and what may save us instead. I spoke to her about that.
This book comes at a moment of both political fracture and stalled secularization. How did that context shape your writing?
I started writing about evangelicalism during the second Obama term, and people kept going back to this Pew survey about the rise of the nones — the people who have no religion. There was this idea that religion was dying out.
We’ve seen this resurgence of white evangelical nationalism in the country. So I think this teleological arc of history has kind of collapsed. And at the same time, I was watching that collapse in my own life where I thought I had made it out of religion and was returning to it.
I do think that we’re getting to a point where the standard narratives that are on offer in secular culture — be it liberal individualism or even feminism, any sort of therapeutic ideology — people are finding unsatisfying. I imagine that’s what’s happening more largely: people just trying to find something to devote themselves to, maybe something that even makes demands of them in a way that our consumerist culture doesn’t.
You went looking for the mystery, the majesty, of being stupefied or consumed. Do you feel that you can find that outside of alcoholism or organized religion, and if so, where?
It’s all around us. It’s in nature. It’s in our relationships with other people. While I was working on this book, I was introduced to the term moral beauty.
I’m obsessed with moral beauty.
Yes! When we admire somebody who’s speaking the truth in a difficult situation, somebody who is making a sacrifice or performing an act of heroism, there is almost an aesthetic quality to that.
I’m choosing this life because it’s more beautiful, and when I drink, I am really ugly. And I don’t want to add more ugliness to the world. That’s something that feels to me unarguable.
The structure of this book is unusual, not your standard narrative arc.
A lot of conversion narratives are actually circular. Somebody thinks they find the answer and then they’re back to sin again, and they sort of have to keep going through this cycle until they finally reach a moment of insight or enlightenment or salvation.
I’m curious about the theology of recovery communities, which are often rooted in religious teaching. What worked about it for you?
On the most basic level, what you’re surrendering to is this basic truth, which is that you can’t control your addiction. And what comes with that is this larger realization that you’re actually not in control of that many things in your life. There’s a lot of things that you just have to accept. And that, for me, was transformative.
The most moving moment of the book for me is when you confess your drinking to your husband. You’re sitting on the kitchen floor sobbing, and he reaches out and touches your head. You write: “I think I would choose to live through all that affliction again, to live it over just as it was, any number of times, if it was the only way to preserve this moment of grace.” You say this book is about attention and will, but were you actually writing about grace?
I think I was, yeah. I was taught growing up in the church that grace is the opposite of will, not attention. And so I was curious if attention, per Weil, was similar to grace. And it turns out that it is.
I think about grace as being completely irrational and undeserved. It’s something that I experienced throughout my drinking: this irrational kindness of strangers, or people in your life forgiving you.
I think a lot of both addiction and religion for me was this attempt to bottle grace or to have it on demand. But almost the definition of it is something that you can’t will.
To bring it back to the current political moment: You write about that experience on the floor almost as a portal, the lowest state as an opening. I’m interested in how we conceive of that on a national level.
You have to acknowledge that the problem is bigger than you, and that you can’t solve it alone. And you have to recognize that the way in which you’ve been trying to solve the problem has completely failed.
I do think that there is a sense of possibility that comes from failure, and that also comes from grace. I think a lot about what Hannah Arendt wrote about forgiveness, and how forgiveness is tied to this idea of natality, the new. All these amazing possibilities open up if we are willing to extend grace to each other.
Read our glowing review of the book.
About The Author
