I’m trying to figure out if I can fall in love again.” “I fell in love with writing, and then I stopped.

“This is a love story,” Mol writes in Train Lord. We talk about the cringing shame Mol feels about his first book (“I was extremely young and terribly ambitious”), and the humility he feels about his second. We talk about the fine line that exists between romanticising, patronising and honouring working-class Australia, and the democratising linearity of train travel. We talk about Mol’s literary heroes and mentors – Roberto Bolaño, Alejandro Zambra, Scott McClanahan, Amanda Lohrey – and the wild necessity of hope (“My book wouldn’t have worked if it wasn’t a book of hope”). “I truly believe,” he tells me, earnestly, “that the stories we tell ourselves are the stories that become true.”Īnd so he and I swap stories in the dark. Or perhaps, his book suggests, they’re one and the same thing. The memoir is as much about the art, craft and alchemy of storytelling as it is about healing. And if I abandoned him again, I wouldn’t be able to forgive myself.” I knew that if I wasn’t able to produce this book, then he would be trapped in there forever. 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.Īs Mol wrote Train Lord he was haunted by an image: “I felt like there was a tiny Oliver, who was not exactly me (but was more or less me), who existed in a storytelling world. 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. But, as you work through that, other people’s stories start to become intermingled with yours, and it becomes very apparent very quickly that there’s something abjectly terrible happening.” “I would be lying if I said that it was my intention to write about masculinity,” Mol admits. With Train Lord, Mol joins a growing fraternity of Aussie writers – including Lech Blaine, Michael Winkler and Michael Mohammed Ahmad – who are rattling the well-soldered cultural cage of manhood. Now there’s Train Lord: a memoir in essays. Those fragments became short monologues that Mol performed in the attic bedroom of his share-house for friends then a one-man show at the Adelaide fringe festival. First he started slipping jokes into his passenger announcements (“Next stop is Como, I’d say, named after the Holden Commo-dore”) then he used the two- to three-minute gaps between stations to sketch out fragments on the back of train timetables – just a sentence or two.

It was on the trains that Mol made his way back, ever so slowly, to storytelling. The railway, Mol learned, was a place of reckoning as well as refuge. We all came to it for our own reasons.” On his first shift, there was a suicide. There were people as young as 18 who’d just come out of high school and hoped they could make a buck. There were doctors, pilots, taxi drivers, fast food attendants. “I had never met a more diverse group of people in my life,” he tells me, “all different nationalities, all different professions. As Mol emerged from his migraine, alienated from his vocation and his body, he took a job as a train guard. Train Lord is not a tale of recovery – of pain vanquished and a self triumphantly restored – but a story of tentative repair. ‘I had never met a more diverse group of people in my life’: Oliver Mol.

Lion jumping line art