Ambivalence: An Education

by Brian Dillon

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 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.

Genres: Nonfiction, Memoir

144 pages, Paperback

Expected publication September 8, 2026

About the author

BRIAN DILLON was born in Dublin in 1969. His books include Objects in This Mirror: Essays (Sternberg Press, 2014), Sanctuary (Sternberg Press, 2011), Ruins (MIT Press/Whitechapel Gallery, 2011), Tormented Hope: Nine Hypochondriac Lives (Penguin, 2009) and In the Dark Room (Penguin 2005).

His writing appears regularly in the Guardian, the London Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, Artforum and frieze. Dillon is reader in critical writing at the Royal College of Art, and UK editor of Cabinet magazine. He is working on a book about the Great Explosion at Faversham in 1916.

Reviews

[Sarah · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found this to be a vulnerable memoir in many ways but at some point it did feel like the author was just listing different literature. Nevertheless it has inspired me to pic up Virgina Wolf’s The Waves.

[David Murray · Rating 3 out of 5]

As in Dillon's three previous publications with Fitzcarraldo, 'Ambivalence' meshes literary criticism with threads of autobiography, in such a way that the personal feeds and informs the analytical. However, the proportions are reversed in this book, with the author's life coming to the forefront and his reflections on culture being a secondary component. Dillon is an essayist and a literary critic, his strength lies primarily in these fields - the section on 'The Waves', relative to the rest of the book, is a testament to this. Nonetheless, watching the author parse through his own personal history created a different sort of intimacy between Dillon and his reader, which supplemented the closeness one generally feels when readying the author's work.

[O · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent, as usual. BD is one of my favourite writers, as he’s not afraid to excavate his own life. At its best, the book is aching and tender.

Where the book could use a little polish is the abundance of lists and the balance of how he writes about his life and the work that inspired him. It’s brilliant when he manages to blend the two together.

I wish he’d write more fiction — however you want to define that — and move away from the slightly more academic ‘jargon’ (which he defends in the book, but often gets mired in) to something looser.

All this listing is okay, but does come off as a Watch Mojo list for smart people.

[Y · Rating 5 out of 5]

What makes Ambivalence work (or not work) is precisely how personal it is and how much the reader can relate. Otherwise its account of reluctance, suspension, not-knowing can feel too abstract or elusive.

What I took from it is that ambivalence is not always laziness or indecision. It often comes from a lack of genuine attachment to what’s around us — not yet knowing what we like, but perhaps knowing clearly what we don’t.

I loved every mention of The Waves. It’s also my favourite Woolf.