Unreliable Narrator

PJ Vogt (0:30)

I had this experience recently, maybe you'll recognize it. I saw a friend, someone I love. This friend is somebody who is some of the time sober and some of the time not. And I was pretty sure I could tell he'd slipped. He was trying to hide it, but it seemed to me that he was in the part of the cycle where the addiction was just too strong for him to be very convincing. Which of course made me sad. I felt worried for him. But also, I felt his loneliness. Like, I wanted to help him, but he didn't want to be helped, or seen, or noticed. There was a voice in his head that was telling him, everything's fine. And also adding, but make sure nobody notices.

I was imagining this anyway, because I have heard that voice myself. I think of it as the second voice in my mind. Right now, October 2026, I think that voice is obeying me. But I also know that when it's disobeyed me, I didn't notice. Every time I've driven my own life towards a crisis, I'd started it by lying to myself, long before I'd started lying to anybody else.

That place is a lonely place that I think everybody will visit, at least once. And this week, I wanted our entire episode to be an interview with a writer who I think has really captured what it's like when you're in that place, after the second voice in your head has just taken over.

The writer is named Meghan O'Gieblin. Her stunning new memoir is called Will and Detention. Meghan has a singular mind. We talked for a couple of hours about sobriety, relapse, what it's like to have faith and lose it. The kind of conversation I'm always looking for, about the questions that can be hard to talk about.

Hello. Hi. Can you say your name and what you do?

Meghan O'Gieblyn (2:22)

Yep, I am Meghan O'Gieblin, and I'm a writer and essayist. I have written a lot about Christianity. So I grew up in a fundamentalist family. I went to Bible school for a couple of years in my late teens, early twenties, and ended up having a crisis of faith, left that whole world.

And yeah, fell into an addiction around that time. And started drinking, taking a lot of pills, kind of crash and burned my life in my late twenties and got sober.

And then I started writing during that time. I wrote about Christianity. I wrote a little bit about technology, which I became interested in and the relationship between technology and spirituality. And this book is really sort of looking back at that experience and particularly through this other sort of midlife crisis I had, where I started drinking after 10, after 11 years actually of being sober.

PJ Vogt (3:19)

And what was your early childhood in a family of a fundamentalist faith? Like what strain of fundamentalism was it? Like what did your family believe? What did you believe?

Meghan O'Gieblyn (3:30)

So yeah, I should say that my family would not identify themselves as fundamentalists. This is always sort of a label that you point at other people.

But they were non-denominational evangelicals. And, I mean, I say we were fundamentalists because I was taught six-day creationism, that God actually created the world in six days. We were taught that Christ was going to return probably very, very soon in the future. The faith I was raised in was really focused on the end times and this idea that history was going to get worse and worse, and there was going to be tribulations and all of these horrible natural disasters that eventually would lead to the destruction of the world. And yeah, so I grew up not really having a strong sense of the future because there was this sense that we weren't going to be around for very long, that life as we knew it was going to be disrupted by this major eschatological event.

PJ Vogt (4:31)

I think the kind of people who listen to podcasts, where people talk about their very literary memoirs, often are not people who grow up with that kind of faith. And I think if you're on that other side of the line, one of the things that people wonder about, something that I wonder about is just what that kind of faith is like. Like when you were young and you believed that all this apocalyptic tribulation was coming, did you believe in that the way you believe that there will be winter this year? Or did you believe in it the way you believe in climate change? Or did you believe in it as something that sometimes you had a hard time believing in, you had to work to believe? Like what did it feel like to believe that?