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

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I had never met a more diverse group of people in my life’: Oliver Mol. Photograph: Penguin Random House 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.

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. No one cares,” a friend tells Mol at the “tail end of a bender”. Train Lord is imbued with that morning-after feeling of trying to make it make sense – and realising precisely that no one does care. The world’s indifference can be liberating too. “We were on a train, out of the way of our lives, any of us could tell any story we liked,” as Diski puts it. “We were, for the time being, just the story we told.” The impact of the more sensitive anecdotes and descriptions is sometimes weakened by adding music which can sometimes drown out the speech and only detracts from the emotional weight of the story. So I looked around and saw all the trains and train lines and overhead wires, and I looked even further and saw all the cars and roads and people. Then I looked even further and saw Maria and I saw myself too. I saw that we were smiling. We were smiling because we knew you couldn’t see the real killers.

Award-winning author Oliver Mol's debut is a true, funny and heartbreaking tale about a 10-month migraine, his recovery in Brisbane and job on the railway when he couldn't do anything else. Performed to music by Thomas Gray & Liam Ebbs, Seekae and Nils Frahm amongst others, and to visuals by Kat Chellos, it is a story of hope, laughter, pain, relationships, drugs, failed orgies, mothers, fathers and love. For the first generation of writers to have grown-up online, alt-lit was characterised by the employment of chat-forums and tweet formats as formal constraints and by references to chronic internet use. At their most successful — as in the work of Scott McClanahan or Blake Butler — alt-lit writers can paint a portrait of millennial alienation by toggling unexpectedly between compulsive earnestness and absurdistdetachment. Train Lord is the product of those two years spent on Sydney’s railways. Another writer might have turned their gaze entirely outwards to describe the world they saw from the guard’s boxy little cabin. Yet what Train Lord mainly isn’t is a book about being a train guard, what with it being quite a dull gig. It’s the vacancy that suits Mol. “I was there,” he confides, “to go around and around for as long as I needed to figure out my problems, and to work out if it might be possible to love myself again.” A book that speaks to anyone who’s gone to the darker side of life and still come out alive’ Paul Dalla Rosa 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.

https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/56677/how-not-to-write-a-novel-by-sandra-newman-howard-mittelmark/9780141038544 We can't guarantee any of this will help with your word count, but we all need to take breaks, right?

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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?

Sydney author Oliver Mol delivers his autobiographical monologue with such clarity and heart ... best just go.’ Confused, the protagonist Domecq presses further. ‘Do you mean to tell me that out there in the world nothing is happening?’ To which the executive replies, ‘Very Little.’ Before ushering Domecq out of his office, he issues a caution:He can also do observational comedy, especially when it comes to the intricacies of railway life. On one occasion he is “riding up front” with the driver, “smoking cigarettes and listening to jazz from a transistor radio with our feet on the dash”, when his workmate tells him of a signaller ahead who, because his arm is missing, can’t wave it as the job requires. 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. You might glean that I didn’t enjoy this book, you’d glean wrong. A roller coaster ride into a drug addled world (some prescribed, many not) I found immensely interesting. How and why he’s still alive could accurately be described as minor miracles. Train Lord is a memoir. The author’s life was drastically changed by chronic pain. He manages to get a job working on trains and eventually things start changing. But that’s not even the half of it, because I’m not telling you about the elderly couples we saw helping one another along platforms and the kids we saw playing peek-a-boo with their reflections and the fathers who spent entire Sundays with their disabled sons: he knows the timetable and all the trains, one father told me. He loves riding the network, which means it’s my favourite thing too.

After such a prolonged period of agony, he realises this painful experience has radically altered not only his lifestyle but also his perception of life. Our heart wrenches as he relives his emotional turmoil with Mol giving us a passionate and undiluted performance. The empathy and investment stretch so far that when he recounts his stories about the strange happenings at the train station, you’re delighted to see the fond expressions on his face. I ask him if he’s figured it out. If he has been able to move beyond the purgative urgency he felt writing Train Lord to something kinder. The way of the train is also the way of the boarding school, the convent, the prison and the psychiatric hospital,” Jenny Diski wrote in her 2002 travel memoir Stranger on a Train, in which she interweaves the story of a trip around the United States by Amtrak with her memories of incarceration in mental hospitals in her youth. She is taking the journey to write a book but her stated intention is “to keep still”. Her hope is for “a substantial journey without going anywhere exactly, meetings and conversations which also would go nowhere”. But lying in her sleeping compartment, she finds that “all the separate stories, all those minds and hearts took on volume and mass, occupying the empty space in my compartment, squeezing out the very air before spreading to the corridor outside and the entire train”.Train Lord is a memoir that must incessantly justify its own existence to those who are reading it. Consider the following passage: Esse Es Percipicrafts a mood of conspiracy in which some aspect of authenticity has been mislaid. If you reroute the story along the lines of a different cultural figure you’ll find that it still rings true. Here’s one I prepared earlier: From that exact moment, fiction, along with the whole gamut of literature, belongs to the genre of drama, performed by a single man in a Paris Review interview or by actors before a Writers’ Festival Panel. In other words, the mannerisms, lifestyle choices, political opinions, daily routines and career trajectories of the Writer are the grist on one side of a publicity machine which expels, on the other, artefacts of public consumption for a digitally connected feedlot of aspiring writers. Can you hear me? What? Can you hear me? No. After a while my family and I just laughed: the phone barely worked. It dropped out every ten seconds, but I could send texts and look at the screen, could communicate and be heard. Eventually my family encouraged me to try recording stories on what we now called my burner phone. Burnie Sanders, my brother would say. Feel the burn! Give him the business! And so I would make my announcements, then hit record, stopping, to open and close the train doors, before departing, and hitting record again. The process was frustrating, time consuming, but it gave me something to do, and after roughly a month I produced my first story – this.