Autobiographical writing is often slotted into easily marketable categories—the solitary odyssey, the bereavement chronicle, the trauma plot. Meghan O’Gieblyn’s brilliantly unclassifiable “Will and Attention” resists the pull toward categorization. The memoir is in some ways a familiar story of addiction and recovery, but it has a jagged, nonlinear trajectory that makes reading it unpredictable and occasionally frightening.

O’Gieblyn, a recovering alcoholic, writes about how, after eleven years of sobriety, she suddenly and unaccountably relapsed. Around the same time, she began attending Catholic Mass, and the book hovers on the edge of becoming a conversion narrative. O’Gieblyn reads the philosophy of Simone Weil and of Iris Murdoch. She keeps working, attending conferences on the ethics of artificial intelligence, as part of her job as a journalist. She tells herself that she’ll stop drinking.

She does eventually stop, but the disorienting interval leaves her sense of self unsettled. “My life has lost its arc, and I fear that it’s become less a narrative than one of those demented children’s songs that goes around in circles,” O’Gieblyn writes. “But the desire to understand is still there; it is one more thing that I cannot manage to renounce.” I recently spoke with O’Gieblyn about her writing process and her reading habits as a memoirist.

Our conversation has been edited and condensed.

Your memoir plays with familiar categories, but it doesn’t follow a neat arc. Did you see the book as working in or resisting particular genres?

I was definitely resisting the recovery-memoir genre. In fact, I initially resisted writing about my experience with addiction altogether. I wanted to write a more traditional bibliomemoir about reading Simone Weil, but it just wasn’t working.

What helped me write more directly about my life was thinking about the book as part of a larger tradition of spiritual autobiography. In some ways, a spiritual autobiography and a recovery memoir share a similar arc: “I was lost, and now I’m found.” There’s a transformation that takes place, and an illusion that you’re standing on the other side of your struggles and speaking with authority about them.

But a lot of those traditional conversion stories are also very circular. One really beautiful example of this is Thomas Merton’s “The Seven Storey Mountain,” which is about how Merton came to be a Trappist monk. He had some powerful encounters with Catholicism, and started attending Mass while he was studying literature at Columbia. But he was also immersed in the jazz scene in New York and kept periodically returning to this life of drinking and carousing, even after his baptism. There’s a lot of circularity. The title of the memoir alludes to Dante’s Mt. Purgatorio, which is a terraced mountain climbed by going around in circles. I was interested in books that dramatize that looping path of regression and slow progress.

What other books did you draw on for inspiration?

Reading journals and diaries helped me in terms of tone and atmosphere. What I appreciate about them is that there’s an assumed reader, but it also feels like eavesdropping on somebody who is just thinking about their life.