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

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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. 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. Train Lord is not so much a book about trains as an account of an unfinished process of healing. At its weakest it’s a self-help book, with too many passages quoted from “cod philosophers”, such as the discredited British journalist Johann Hari, that are left unexplored and unexplained. But as it flits between the genres of memoir and short-story collection, it beautifully captures the complexities of illness and of coming to terms with life as an adult. Mol recalls childhood memories and present-day intimate conversations with a tenderness that rivals Karl Ove Knausgård, though his prose is more cluttered and less succinct.

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. I didn’t have many friends at work, and this suited me fine. I wasn’t there to make friends – I was there 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. So join us for some entertaining and enlightening chitchat, and learn things about yourself you've long suspected, but have been deliberately ignoring for years. We write to understand humanness and Oliver Mol achieves it with exceptional honesty and gripping emotionalism. This book is special’ Ennis Cehic 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.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. 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. Mostly, this is a book about the beginning, middle and gradual end of a migraine that threatened to terminate his life as a writer. What Mol writes about, aside from being in pain, is the incremental process of learning to write again; to dash down word pictures on scraps that accumulate over six years into this book about writing a book that is only eponymously about being a train guard. Instead of a talking cure, it’s a writing therapy. 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.

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. Train Lord is a memoir that must incessantly justify its own existence to those who are reading it. Consider the following passage: Listen: sometimes I hate writing, but it’s only because I’m scared, because a story told well has the power to break you. 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. 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.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.

the scene, like all scenes, like all people, was not good or bad. It was toxic and supportive and elitist and welcoming. It was full of hate and love. The scene was an experiment. We were depressed and excited and scared and motivated. We were anxious. His doctors can't figure out how to fix him. He suffers a breakdown. One evening, high on pain killers, Oliver Googles the only thing he can think of: 'full-time job, no experience, Sydney'. An ad for a train guard appears and, desperate, Oliver takes it.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. 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. 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. 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. 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.