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

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Oliver Mol was a successful, clever, healthy twenty-five-year old. Then one day the migraine started. Listen: sometimes I hate writing, but it’s only because I’m scared, because a story told well has the power to break you. Train Lord is a memoir that must incessantly justify its own existence to those who are reading it. Consider the following passage:

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. 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. 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.

We write to understand humanness and Oliver Mol achieves it with exceptional honesty and gripping emotionalism. This book is special’ Ennis Cehic 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.

It's that time of year again when words-per-day becomes the currency. So we thought we'd bring you even more words... Words of novel-writing wisdom! No, no... not from us... obviously. From novelist and longtime book editor Howard Mittelmark. Co-writer of How NOT to Write A Novel. A fantastic book full of the pitfalls most writers fall into when they're setting off along the long and arduous road to Novelton, Nebraska. From that exact moment, soccer, along with the whole gamut of sports, belongs to the genre of the drama, performed by a single man in a booth or by actors in jerseys before the TV cameras. 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.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. 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. The only person who gets to control how you feel is you. Most people spend their entire lives hurting, or being hurt, but that hurting only brings more hurt until your whole world becomes pain.”