Oct 9, 2026 · 52 min · 10 segments
An interview with a writer, Meghan O’Gieblyn, who started lying to herself about her relationship to alcohol and God. And afterwards wondered: when did it start? Why did it happen? How do you make…
Meghan O'GieblynGuest
PJ VogtHost
Uh, went to Bible school for a couple years, uh, in my late teens, early twenties, and ended up having a crisis of faith.
And, yeah, fell into an addiction around that time and, uh, started drinking, taking a lot of pills, kind of crashed and burned my life in my late twenties and got sober.
I wrote a little bit about, about technology, which I became interested in, and the relationship between technology and spirituality.
And this book is really sort of, uh, looking back at that experience and particularly through this other sort of midlife crisis I had where I started drinking after ten-- after eleven years actually of, of being sober.
And what was your early childhood in a family of a fundamentalist faith? Like, what strain of fundamentalism was it? Like, what, what did your family believe? What did you believe?
So, yeah, I should say that my family would not identify themselves as fundamentalists.
And I mean, I say we were fundamentalists because, you know, I was taught six-day creationism, uh, that God actually created the world in six days.
Um, we were taught that, you know, Christ was going to return probably very, very soon in the future.
Um, the faith I was raised in was really focused on the end times and this idea that, that history was gonna get worse and worse and there was gonna be tribulations and all of these horrible natural disasters, and eventually would lead to, to the destruction of the world.
And yeah, so I grew up, like, not really having a, a, a strong sense of the future 'cause there was this sense that we weren't gonna be around for very long, that life as we knew it was gonna be disrupted by this major eschatological event.
I think when people-- Like, the kind of people who listen to podcasts where people talk about their, like, very literary memoirs often are not people who grew 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 Sort of all this apocalyptic tribulation was coming.
Uh, went to Bible school for a couple years, uh, in my late teens, early twenties, and ended up having a crisis of faith.
And, yeah, fell into an addiction around that time and, uh, started drinking, taking a lot of pills, kind of crashed and burned my life in my late twenties and got sober.
I wrote a little bit about, about technology, which I became interested in, and the relationship between technology and spirituality.
And this book is really sort of, uh, looking back at that experience and particularly through this other sort of midlife crisis I had where I started drinking after ten-- after eleven years actually of, of being sober.
And what was your early childhood in a family of a fundamentalist faith? Like, what strain of fundamentalism was it? Like, what, what did your family believe? What did you believe?
So, yeah, I should say that my family would not identify themselves as fundamentalists.
And I mean, I say we were fundamentalists because, you know, I was taught six-day creationism, uh, that God actually created the world in six days.
Um, we were taught that, you know, Christ was going to return probably very, very soon in the future.
Um, the faith I was raised in was really focused on the end times and this idea that, that history was gonna get worse and worse and there was gonna be tribulations and all of these horrible natural disasters, and eventually would lead to, to the destruction of the world.
And yeah, so I grew up, like, not really having a, a, a strong sense of the future 'cause there was this sense that we weren't gonna be around for very long, that life as we knew it was gonna be disrupted by this major eschatological event.
I think when people-- Like, the kind of people who listen to podcasts where people talk about their, like, very literary memoirs often are not people who grew 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 Sort of all this apocalyptic tribulation was coming.
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