Unreliable Narrator

The host opens with a story about seeing a loved one who is sometimes sober and sometimes not. He believed the friend had relapsed and was trying, unsuccessfully, to hide it. The host felt both worry and the friend’s loneliness: the friend wanted help but also did not want to be seen or noticed. He imagined an internal voice saying that everything was fine while warning the person to make sure nobody noticed. The host recognizes that voice because he has heard it himself. He argues that his own crises usually began with lying to himself long before he lied to anyone else. That experience motivates the episode-long interview with writer Megan Ogiblin, whose memoir Will and Attention examines sobriety, relapse, faith, and the loss of faith. The host frames the conversation around the problem of an inner voice that can take over while disguising itself as rational thought.

Megan Ogiblin explains that her family would not have called itself fundamentalist; they were non-denominational evangelicals. But she was taught six-day creationism, expected Christ to return soon, and grew up with an apocalyptic view in which history would worsen, tribulation and disasters would follow, and the world would ultimately be destroyed. As a child, this belief felt like fact. Her pastor, already in his seventies, said he expected Christ to return within his lifetime, which made Megan wonder whether applying to college was even worthwhile. As a teenager, encountering people who did not share her beliefs made Christianity feel less like obvious reality and more like a belief that needed defending. Her faith ultimately unraveled through the problem of evil: if God is benevolent and all-powerful, why does evil exist? The September 11 attacks intensified that question. Megan was struck that the terrorists appeared to possess an extreme, sincere faith and believed their actions were good. She began wondering what made her own faith genuine rather than equally deluded. She did not formally announce that she was leaving. Instead, she engineered an exit from Bible school by going to the mission field in Ecuador, where she felt less controlled by authorities and friends. She stopped attending church and praying, and later returned to Chicago, where she spent about eight years working in bars and restaurants.

Megan is cautious about claiming that losing faith caused her drinking, noting that alcoholism runs in her family and might have emerged regardless. Still, she associates the two experiences because losing Christianity removed a sense of purpose. God had never felt especially personal to her, but religion had given history a direction and made events part of a larger plan. Afterward, the world felt random and meaningless. She describes reading Russian novels while experiencing, almost alone, the nineteenth-century crisis in which “God does not exist, everything is permitted.” Drinking became both a way to act on that permission and a way to escape a deep depression. She did not initially feel especially guilty about alcohol. She felt worse about smoking and sex, while alcohol made bad feelings disappear. Working in a Chicago jazz club, where many employees drank heavily, normalized her behavior. She drank during shifts, was sometimes too drunk to count her drawer, and was a blackout drinker almost from the beginning. She combined alcohol with Adderall and opioids, sometimes using stimulants to keep drinking or remain apparently functional. She recalls driving the Dan Ryan while unconscious, waking without knowing where she had parked, and occasionally discovering that her car had been impounded. Withdrawal and panic made her afraid she might die. She tried month-long or two-week periods of abstinence but repeatedly returned to drinking because sobriety felt flat and meaningless. She justified the problem by calling herself an unusually passionate or extreme person. Although she increasingly recognized that she was alcoholic, recognizing the problem did not give her the ability—or willingness—to stop.

Megan connects her experience to the Greek idea of akrasia, or weakness of will: knowing what is wrong while doing it anyway. She kept writing journal entries telling herself to get her life together and listing the damage alcohol was causing, then would go directly to a bar. She describes this as a conflict between two desires: one that wanted sobriety and another that wanted the behavior she intellectually rejected. The host observes that both sides of Megan’s mind seem to have the same intellectual power. Megan agrees that addiction is especially dangerous when it presents itself as the person’s “higher self.” During her later relapse, she would book travel for speaking engagements and tell herself she would not drink. When choosing between an early and late flight, she selected the later one and invented practical reasons—such as having time for breakfast—while unconsciously knowing she would be drunk or hung over and unable to make the early flight. Megan says writing did not automatically eliminate this deception. Some passages in her memoir romanticized drinking or minimized its consequences, and she had to revise them to remove half-truths. She considers the writer an unreliable narrator when writing about addiction, because the addicted part can produce convincing prose as well as convincing excuses. Writing helped bring her conflicting selves somewhat closer together, but it did not abolish the doubleness.

Megan describes spending months fantasizing about drinking before her relapse. During the pandemic, bars and restaurants began using QR codes, which allowed customers to order without speaking. She had been unable even to imagine saying her order aloud, because speaking would make the fantasy real. The QR code removed that barrier and felt like a loophole or permission from the universe. She ordered one drink and then many more. Asked what it felt like to drink after eleven years sober, Megan admits that it was “amazing,” although she would not emphasize that in a sobriety meeting. Alcohol immediately silenced the hypercritical mind that years of spiritual work had not quieted. She experiences alcohol not as ordinary pleasure but as something resembling religious rapture: a total transcendence of self. She compares it to the biblical “Pearl of Great Price,” whose value is so overwhelming that a person will sell everything to possess it. Her conclusion is that sobriety requires finding another “pearl”—God, a moral ideal, beauty, or another good valued for its own sake. During the relapse, Megan also began secretly pursuing Catholicism without telling her partner or others. She was drawn to Mass partly for the same reason she was drawn to alcohol: surrendering herself to something larger brought relief. The host notes the apparent contradiction between her stable, successful life and her intense pursuit of both relapse and religion. Megan says she had become bored with stability and missed the dynamism and rapture of crisis.

Megan says her first eight or nine sober years involved active recovery, meditation, meetings, and work with other alcoholics. Over time she stopped attending meetings and participating in those communities. She believes that this left her merely maintaining a good life rather than moving forward spiritually. The recovery story—being lost and then found—had become repetitive, and because she was far removed from the original pain, she no longer fully believed the words she was saying. The memoir’s structure comes from a Simone Weil line: “We have to try to cure our faults by attention and not by will.” Megan had always interpreted drinking as a failure of will, but relapse convinced her that willpower alone was insufficient. The real failure was allowing her attention to drift away from the practices and commitments that had kept her well. By the time temptation appeared, the decisive work had already been done or neglected. The host compares this to his own attempt to observe a mindlessly self-destructive part of himself, joking about eating four popsicles while supposedly dieting and planning to tell his psychiatrist. Megan says attention is not merely intense focus or a productivity technique. Weil’s version is closer to waiting, looking, and witnessing without grasping. Recovery communities helped because Megan could see addiction and recovery more objectively in other people. She concludes that daily attention builds the kind of person who can act well when temptation arrives; the goal is not to win a final battle in the moment, but to cultivate the capacity beforehand.