Train Lord: The Astonishing True Story of One Man's Journey to Getting His Life Back On Track

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The trainer told us to be prepared for anything. He told us about the accidents, about the suicides. He told us there was nearly one a day, but the tabloids didn’t report it. He told us father’s day was the worst. Followed by Christmas. More cunts die on the railway than the roads. Just look around. Everything can kill you. The first day of train school our teacher asked us what we would do if we were on the train, and we had to go to the toilet, and we’d already had our break. For a while, no one spoke. Then Susie said, Shit in a bag, sir. Yeah. Probably shit in a bag. Good on ya, Suze, our teacher said. The shit in a bag approach. A classic. Then we went around the room and said our names and where we’d come from and a fun fact about us too. Ed said he’d worked in logistics and sailed around the world with the Navy in his youth, and Zayd had been a transit cop with a baby on the way. But now it was my turn and I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t want to talk about the migraine or how I’d failed as a writer. I didn’t want to talk about pain. So I said my name was Oliver and flipped my wrist frypan-style. I winked and said that I loved to cook. I think anyone who struggled with ill health or chronic pain will be able to relate to Oliver’s story. The impact that ill health can have on you mentally is something that is different for everyone and not always understood but this book will have you feeling seen in some way or another.

And there is Bruce, a mysterious octogenarian colleague who entered the railways 15 years after retirement and “failed his practical exam three times because he kept falling asleep in the guard compartment”. Mol clearly identifies with his workmates but – somewhat jarringly within a sector with such a strong collective identity – this doesn’t extend beyond idle chitchat. “I never learned anyone’s name – except Bruce,” he observes. There are occasional nods to the realities of industrial relations – such as the possibility that bosses will scrap guards altogether – but Mol’s narrative is fairly distant from the workplace politics more present in the railways than in almost every other industry worldwide. That’s not to say that writers no longer exist, or that writers are no longer creating stylistically inventive work, but that every emerging writer experiences the following double-bind: that given how ubiquitous it has become to access information about anything writing-adjacent, we find ourselves more concerned with the attendant anxieties of wanting to be a writer than the anxieties of actually writing. All the while we subject ourselves to the self-flagellatory belief that this purer, more authentic commitment to the craft is no longer accessible to those of us who compulsively over-analyse it. We all know, and resent knowing, that as Mol recalls, ‘the first rule about writing was that you never called yourself a writer’.Mol has every opportunity here to construct a pointed critique of the ways in which institutions prey on aspiring writers by not only promising them the possibility of subcultural fame but by requiring that the majority fail so as to persist as consumers of additionally manufactured solutions; or even of the ways in which emerging writers can come to enjoy the terms of their own exploitation. Instead, Mol averts to these insights only when they function as a conduit for his own redemptive character arc. Train Lordwill be performed from 10-12 August at theSpace @ Niddry Street – Studio at 7:20pm as part of Edinburgh Fringe. Despite this minor distraction, Train Lord excels in its frank and moving journey of self-rediscovery as he recounts the most challenging, yet transformative, period of his life.The memoir is as much about the art, craft and alchemy of storytelling as it is about healing. Or perhaps, his book suggests, they’re one and the same thing. “I truly believe,” he tells me, earnestly, “that the stories we tell ourselves are the stories that become true.” Congratulations, our teacher said on the last day of school. You’ve all won the lottery. I’ve been with the railway for 47 years, and I’ve never worked a day in my life. At some point we returned to the path and walked to the platform. We sat at Waterfall station and waited for the train. And I knew there was no logic to anything. Because the very things that killed you could also bring you home.

Sydney author Oliver Mol delivers his autobiographical monologue with such clarity and heart ... best just go.’ What happens when a writer can no longer write? What happens when pain is so intense that you question who you are and whether you can bare it any longer? For ten months, the pain was constant, exacerbated by writing, reading, using computers, looking at phones or anything with a screen. Slowly he became a writer who no longer wrote, and a person who could no longer could communicate with the modern world. In literature, and life, Oliver began to disappear.

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That invitation extends to you too, listeners! We want your submissions for our Traditional Ghost Story Christmas Special later in the year. Meanwhile, its members were criticised for their unabashed solipsism, for revelling in the concerns of the privileged, for asking how many angels can dance on the head of a ketamine spoon. But such accusations actually undersell the intelligence of the alt-lit writers who strive to incorporate every possible critique into their book’s designs. The issue, if any, is that the alt-lit writer is too aware of his own privilege such that he feels the need to create an entire body of work publicly excusing it. Connor Thomas O’Brien correctly diagnosesthe alt-lit phenomena as: We can't guarantee any of this will help with your word count, but we all need to take breaks, right? This memoir had the perfect amount of funny and quite frankly, bizarre moments that were balanced out with some truly heartbreaking, lump in your throat kinda moments. And I really enjoyed every second of it.

Needing an income as he recovered, Mol saw a job advertised for a train guard. “The money you could earn – at least to me – was astonishing,” he enthuses. (Salaries can assume that hallucinatory quality for self-employed authors.) Unlike writing, it required no experience. Another thing, that didn’t bother me but might others, is that “the” is not the most common word. No indeed, the “I”s have it in almost every sentence and generally more than once. So why do you do it? Sam asks, after another year goes by and i’m still working on the book. You’ll think it’s sappy, I say. Or worse — stupid. Try me, he says. Because I made prayers to myself all those years ago, and I’m trying to answer them with this book. Part monologue, part performance art and part essay, Train Lord collapses genre and form to create a stunning portrait of pain, creativity and failure. Achingly authentic, funny and poignant, this is a breathtakingly honest study of humanity from one of Australia’s most exciting emerging writers.

He tells me about the men who’d come to see his one-man show – these grizzled old blokes in their 50s and 60s – and how they’d wait for him afterwards so they could quietly share stories they’d never felt they could tell anyone else. And of his own father, and how it took the mighty wrench of the migraine – the forced vulnerability of it – for them to find a language through which to communicate. Alt-lit often employs self-conscious repetition as a literary technique in ways that call to mind the mechanics of internet virality. Mol repeats how he feverishly wrote his novel on scraps of paper in between stops while driving the train, or repeats how he created puns to announce the arrival of each station like ‘attention, customers… next stop is Ashfield. But for all the singles out there, we call it PASHFIELD.’ In the early days of viral content (as in Charlie bit my finger),home video wouldcirculateonline in a kind of organicprocessof attentional mimesis. Today, viral content possesses a synthetic quality because we, as both consumers and creators, have market-researched how best to imitate our own authenticity. Mol repeatedly asserts that ‘the stories we tell ourselves are the ones that become true;’ that ‘from my writer days, I knew if you repeated something then it would come true’ and that ‘I knew if you could believe in lies, you could believe in anything. I knew if you did it enough then those lies would become true.’ Granted, it reads as though Mol is inducing his own virality by spamming your feed with an origin story of his own making. In truth, I did not know what he meant. I was single; I lived in Darlington, 500 metres from Redfern station, three minutes from Central by train. I did not have to think for others, nor did I have a mortgage, or any debt beyond my enormous university one – compiled from years of useless degrees and indecision.

I told him I didn’t know how he did it, commuting an hour and a half each way. We required eleven hours between shifts, but assuming, for example, that he finished at 2.30am, he would, at best, if he had a car, be home around 3.45am, though if he had to rely on public transport, it would be closer to 5 in the morning. Then, he would sleep six or seven or eight hours only to wake in time for the return commute in the event that he had a 3.30pm start. Of course, a shift like this was rare, but not unheard of, and as a new guard, one had to wait until a line opened up on the roster, until they had accrued enough seniority, which only happened when someone died, or quit. Only then could a guard transition to a permanent line that allowed them to sleep, to see their partners, to live a life of one’s own rather that facilitating the movement and direction of others. the literature of the over-educated and under-employed (usually white) young person,attempting to reject their privilege. The Gchats and hamsters and vegan muffins, in other words, are ancillary. More specifically, Alt Lit writers tend to position themselves at the very centre of their universe, but employ a flattening of affect and deliberately naive outlook designed todeflect inevitable charges of narcissismby situating their work as akin to Outsider Art. Oliver Mol’s award-winning debut Train Lord takes us on an intimate journey of hope, resilience, and self-discovery in his brutally honest depiction of chronic pain. Immediately we are plunged into an anecdote where he recounts the relief he experienced when his migraine finally went away. His descriptions are striking in their visceral detail, leaving audiences feeling raw. Mol never shies away from the blunt and agonising reality of his condition so we’re always fervently invested, rooting for some sort of happy ending. In a way we’re almost longing with him as he tries to resume his way of life; drinking, socialising and just trying to feel whole again. But as we soon find out, it’s not that simple.Oliver Mol was a successful, clever, healthy twenty-five-year old. Then one day the migraine started. Oliver is not your typical author, no, Oliver is raw and shoots from the hip and appears to be unaware of his affect upon others. What happens when the one thing that has practically defined your life is now gone? All of a sudden, the reset button has been pressed: new job, new workplace… a new identity. This is a love story,” Mol writes in Train Lord. “I fell in love with writing, and then I stopped. I’m trying to figure out if I can fall in love again.”