An arresting memoir about a 10-month migraine, a recovery in Australia, and a job on the railway when there were no other options
Oliver Mol was a successful, clever, healthy twenty-five-year old. Then one day the migraine started. For ten months, the pain was constant, exacerbated by writing, reading, using computers, looking at phones or anything with a screen. Slowly, Oliver began to disappear.
One evening, Oliver googled the only thing he could think of: 'full-time job, no experience, Sydney'. An ad for a train guard appeared. For two years Oliver watched others live their lives, observing the intimacy of strangers brought together briefly and connected by the steady march of time.
Exquisitely written and bravely told, Train Lord is a searingly personal yet hugely relatable book, which asks what happens when your sense of self is suddenly destroyed, and how you get it back.
About the Author
Oliver Mol is the author of the critically acclaimed Lion Attack!. He was the inaugural winner of the Scribe Nonfiction Prize for Young Writers as well as the recipient of an Australian Council Grant. In 2020, the stage show of Train Lord proved a runaway success during the Sydney Fringe Season. Oliver grew up dividing his time between Texas and Brisbane and now lives in Sydney.
Praise For…
Mol's offbeat prose has a one-man performance quality to it . . . If Train Lord were a train, it would be a heritage line, an intimate preservation of a moment in time, full of personality ―The Times
As much about the art, craft and alchemy of storytelling as it is about healing ― Heromag
Rude, raw, visceral, painful and wildly funny ― Saga Magazine
A highly intimate and emotional consideration of the relationship between pain, life, and the methods we use to escape both ― Adelaide Fringe
Mol's writing is a revelation. Nuanced, at times dryly satirical or melancholy, it is always rich, poetic and intoxicating ― Bakehouse Studio
Like his alt-lit forebears, Oliver Mol's writing can often feel like alchemy, constructing brief, glimmering moments of catharsis from the meandering absurdities of life ― Guardian, 'Best Australian Books of 2022'
