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When Irish writer, Brian Dillon was sixteen his mother died and he simply gave up all schoolwork. But his real education was going on elsewhere: with books, music, films and television. When at least he made it to university, his head was already full of avant-garde writing, art and ideas. Could academia liveup to the hopes and dreams he had invested in it? Halfway through college his father died, and the stakes of reading and writing seemed even higher. Ambivalence explores what learning meant to is author, what it enabled and denied between the ages of seventeen and twenty-six, when he left his native Dublin. It is a memoir of that city in the 1980s and 1990s, an uncynical portrait of the adolescent and early adult , and an intimate defence of radical drinking about literature and life. 

“My brother kicked me in the balls, but I threw a knife at his head. We were in a strange world after our parents died”, in Ambivalence, Brian Dillon documents the death of his parents and the shocking aftermath, as he and his brothers are left to fend for themselves.

Dillion, sitting in his front room in Greenwich laughing about the time he was on the Rathmines College public speaking team. Dillon was repeating his leaving certificate at the college and. As recounted  in his superb new book Ambivalence.

Dillon refers to himself as “B”, the person doing the remembering is not he one who did the things remembered- but it creator further emotional distance for a writer who has already plenty cool. Dillon revelled not only in music but in “the style press” of the 1980s. People appear here as secondary to the ideas that thrill B: although friends are mentioned, the overall sense is of a young man most alive when alone – alone with his books. We only find out what Dillon’s mother died from -Scleroderma- because the condition also killed the artist Paul Klee. Young Dillon pursues in Ambivalence, with each aesthetic clue… as if it would solve everything”. Ambivalence by Brian Dillion Fitzcarraldo £12.99/ NYPB $16.95, 172 pages.