Suddenly unable to write, the acclaimed young author took a job on the railway. His memoir Train Lord tells of the refuge and reckoning he found there
hen Oliver Mol’s zeitgeisty volume of auto-fiction, Lion Attack!, was released in 2015, he was hailed as one of Australian literature’s bright young things. But in its aftermath he was left with a 10-month migraine that trapped the author in a state of “catatonic panic”.
Train Lord is not a tale of recovery – of pain vanquished and a self triumphantly restored – but a story of tentative repair. A self remade. As Mol emerged from his migraine, alienated from his vocation and his body, he took a job as a train guard. “I had never met a more diverse group of people in my life,” he tells me, “all different nationalities, all different professions. There were doctors, pilots, taxi drivers, fast food attendants.
He tells me about the men who’d come to see his one-man show – these grizzled old blokes in their 50s and 60s – and how they’d wait for him afterwards so they could quietly share stories they’d never felt they could tell anyone else. And of his own father, and how it took the mighty wrench of the migraine – the forced vulnerability of it – for them to find a language through which to communicate.
The memoir is as much about the art, craft and alchemy of storytelling as it is about healing. Or perhaps, his book suggests, they’re one and the same thing. “I truly believe,” he tells me, earnestly, “that the stories we tell ourselves are the stories that become true.”
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