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.

Train Lord is a memoir that must incessantly justify its own existence to those who are reading it. Consider the following passage: 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. 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.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. 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.

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.” 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.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.

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. 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. 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. 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. Then there’s the things that aren’t explained; such as what he’s doing in Sydney, why he’s on the Central Coast, what job did his father lose in Texas that saw the family end up in Canberra and where does Brisbane fit into all of this? Oliver doesn’t have a compass that suggests that maybe people would like the dots joined.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. 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. 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.