A memoir of Dublin in the 1980s and 1990s, and an intimate defence of radical thinking about literature and life, by Brian Dillon, 'one of the true treasures of contemporary literature' (Mark O'Connell).

When Brian Dillon was sixteen his mother died and he simply gave up all schoolwork. While he courted exam failure, his real education was going on elsewhere: with books, music, films and television. When at last he made it to university, his head was already full of avant-garde writing, art and ideas. Could academia live up 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 its author, what it enabled and denied, between the ages of seventeen and twenty-six, when he left his native Dublin. It's at once a memoir of that city in the 1980s and 1990s, an uncynical portrait of the adolescent and early-adult mind, and an intimate defence of radical thinking about literature and life.

In vivid present-tense fragments, Dillon describes his first encounters with writers such as Virginia Woolf, Walter Benjamin, Samuel Beckett, Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida. He recalls being seduced by ambivalence, ambiguity and androgyny - on the page and in the life he hoped his reading would transfigure. The era he describes seemed to demand new ways of thinking about aesthetics and politics. Today, when rights are fragile, arts and humanities attacked, and students dismissed as radicals or narcissists, Ambivalence is an argument for the poetic and revolutionary force of changing yourself and even the world by changing what you know.

Details

ISBN13: 9781804272473
Format: Paperback / softback
Number of Pages: 172
Edition:
Publication Date: 04 Aug 2026
Publisher: Fitzcarraldo Editions
Publication City, Country: London, United Kingdom
Dimensions (cm): 19.7(H)x12.5(L)
Weight (gm):

Author Biography

Brian Dillon was born in Dublin in 1969. His books include Affinities, Suppose a Sentence, Essayism, The Great Explosion (shortlisted for the Ondaatje Prize), Objects in This Mirror: Essays, I Am Sitting in a Room, Sanctuary, Tormented Hope: Nine Hypochondriac Lives (shortlisted for the Wellcome Book Prize) and In the Dark Room, which won the Irish Book Award for non-fiction. His writing has appeared in the Guardian, New York Times, London Review of Books, the New Yorker, New York Review of Books, frieze and Artforum. He has curated exhibitions for Tate and Hayward galleries. He lives in London.

Reviews

‘Brian Dillon’s fascinating bildungsroman Ambivalence tells the story of a mind making itself up, hanging, deleting, willfully transforming itself. Every book every friendship, every conversation mark our anti-hero B, who feels compelled to create himself, while the eponymous title assures me he is aware of failure, the frailties of the intellectual life, and how knowing is also always unknowing and unlearning. His resistance, disillusions and embraces create a completely engaging world in which grows an amazing virtual library of necessary readings and investigations. This reader trusts people who doubt themselves and their ideas, and Ambivalence honours a productive and essential trust between writer and reader. This is an exceptional work.’
— Lynne Tillman, author of Weird Fucks

‘This is a brilliant book, which I couldn’t put down. It tells the story of an education that reads like the evocation of an entirely dead world of philosophy, theory and letters in the late 1980s and 90s. It works because of its steadfast refusal of sentimentality. Dillon writes about himself as if he were someone else, someone not in any way clearly visible. Just feint lines on a page. Yet somehow, in its impersonality and distancing, Dillon conjures an intimacy, a compelling and genuinely shaking pathos rather than sham authenticity. Dillon, asks, “Does education still keep its promises?” On the evidence of the prose of this book, it does. And for us, as confusing as one’s intellectual formation always looks in retrospect, it must.’
— Simon Critchley, author of On Mysticism

‘Brian Dillon is always invigoratingly brilliant. His sentences, his stylistic innovations, the range and potency of his intellectual adventures; he is a true master of the literary arts and a writer I would never hesitate to read, whatever his subject.’
— Max Porter, author of Shy (praise for Brian Dillon)

‘What, then, does Ambivalence amount to? Perhaps simply the assertion that uncertainty has its own value. This is persuasive when we acknowledge just how often, as politicians demonstrate for us daily, people lay claim to conviction that is unearned. At the start of the memoir, we meet B as a boy who, standing at a crossroads, “considers his limited options”. By the end, despite considerable personal tragedy, he has accessed an open-minded way of thinking through books that, in their complex variety, carry “the promise of promise itself”. This is a surprisingly hopeful book.... [T]he state of being uncertain carries with it a rich source of possibility.’
— Sarah Moorhouse, Spectator

‘Brian Dillon is one of the true treasures of contemporary literature – a critic and essayist of unmatched style, sensitivity and purpose.’
— Mark O’Connell, author of A Thread of Violence (praise for Brian Dillon)

‘Brian Dillon’s essays match discernment and critical thinking with a sense of pleasure in finding a work of art that speaks to him and lures him into contemplating its mystery and intricacy. His writing is exact and calm; rather than explain he explores, playing what is tentative against what is certain.’
— Colm Tóibín, author of The Magician (praise for Brian Dillon)