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

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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. So get writing - and hopefully we can all sit down round the fire and share a little anthology of all our spooky stories in December.

Mol describes his early schooling in the Alt Lit movement, whose writers trade in relentless millennial sincerity. His ongoing project, his compulsion, is to relate every single crying jag, every romantic agony, every session with patient parents who assure him yet again that everything will be OK in the end (which, after a relapse, it will). He even feels like sobbing in the midst of a throbbing orgy. 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. Listen: sometimes I hate writing, but it’s only because I’m scared, because a story told well has the power to break you.

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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 is a writer who found himself unable to write due to a debilitating migraine that lasted ten months. During the time, his entire life changed; not only could he not write, but he also couldn’t use screens and thus couldn’t communicate in the modern world. And so, he created a new kind of normal for himself and started working as a train conductor. I had never met a more diverse group of people in my life’: Oliver Mol. Photograph: Penguin Random House

As Mol wrote Train Lord he was haunted by an image: “I felt like there was a tiny Oliver, who was not exactly me (but was more or less me), who existed in a storytelling world. I knew that if I wasn’t able to produce this book, then he would be trapped in there forever. And if I abandoned him again, I wouldn’t be able to forgive myself.”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. One afternoon, while waiting for our trains, I began talking to a guard about the usual: how much of the shift they had left, how long they had been on the job, what they had done before. He moved a bit closer, lowered his voice and said, Do you ever get lonely? He told me that since he’d graduated he’d barely seen his wife. He lived north, somewhere on the Central Coast, and between her day shifts and his night shifts and the commute he was struggling to find time to sleep, to see his kids, to relax. There’s just no quality time anymore, he said. I told him I knew what he meant. 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. 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: Then again, the narrative slips in and out of reality with such ease that it’s hard to know whether to take him at his word. A haunting vignette about a childhood love interest totally absorbs us but is then revealed as largely fictitious in a discussion between the author and his father. “We can never tell the whole story because truth, unlike people, cannot be isolated, and therein lies its beauty, its attraction,” says Mol. The wordplay of this sentence, in which beauty and attraction “lie” within truth, is the most convincing evidence of Mol’s inner turmoil as a writer and as a man. His stylistic tics – such as beginning chapters with “know this” or “understand this” – can be irritating, but his intrepid self-reflection turns a narrator who is upfront about his suboptimal behaviour into a likeable character.

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. Sometimes you manage to find a book that truly speaks to your soul. The kind of book that you can’t imagine having lived without reading. This was that book for me. We can't guarantee any of this will help with your word count, but we all need to take breaks, right? 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.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. Diski isn’t the only person to board a train with no direction in mind. After developing an excruciating migraine that did not relent for 10 months, Oliver Mol struggles to read more than a few words. Even after it eases, he can no longer conceive of doing the things that had defined him for his entire adult life: “I had become a reader who no longer read and a writer who no longer wrote.” So he applies for a job as a guard on Sydney Trains for which, crucially, he needs no prior qualifications. His duties provide a welcome relief from both intellectual stimulation and the fashion in which this was ripped away by the migraine: “I had the trains, and it was a relief to know my role, to be given a daily plan, to surrender to something larger than myself.” At the end of his five-month training course, his instructor tells the class: “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.” 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. Oliver Mol was a successful, clever, healthy twenty-five-year old. Then one day the migraine started.

Tender, vital and quietly hopeful: a tale of remaking … As much about the art, craft and alchemy of storytelling as it is about healing. A beautiful book’ The Guardian When I told my friends that I was applying to become a train guard, most of them thought it was a joke. I had been a writer for nearly 10 years by then, and most people assumed it was a writing stunt, that I had run out ideas, that I had turned to method-writing, that I was going what they called Full-Bukowski. The book writes itself! they would say, laughing, and while I would nod, smiling, briefly imagining the book I might one day write, none of this could have been further from the truth. 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? 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.

For two years, Oliver will watch others live their lives, observing the minutia and intimacy of strangers brought together briefly and connected by the steady march of time. 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. 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. 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.