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Ambivalence: An Education
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.
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.
192 pages, Paperback
Published September 8, 2026
About the author
Brian Dillon
84 books238 followersBRIAN 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.
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.
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Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews
July 30, 2026
Tres justet. Tenia moltíssimes ganes de llegir Brian Dillon i pensava que aquest llibre era un bon lloc on començar, més autobiogràfic i per entendre tot el seu marc intel·lectual; d'on venien les seves obsessions, els seus camins acadèmics, el seu sentit de lectura i escriptura, etc...però se m'ha fet pesat. Hi ha moments brillants, interessants, com quan parla de Woolf, quan descriu la seva família, o com una lectura el porta cap a una altra...però m'ha deixat d'interessar en els moments en que era com si fes llistes d'autors, d'obres, sense relacionar-les o explicar-les en un context més gran.
June 12, 2026
I realized I don't have a lit crit tag on my Goodreads shelves because I have avoided criticism since grad school. This book was a flashback to CalArts, an institution that tried to teach me to love Roland Barthes and Walter Benjamin. And I love the people who love them. I truly do! I almost loved Jean Baudrillard. And I love how much Brian Dillon loves Woolf and "RB," as he calls Barthes, but I never feel quite smart enough to fully engage.
Maybe at this point I'm more influenced by psychoanalysis and Instagram pop psychology than I am by postmodern theory, but I got the sense that Dillon doesn't trust himself to talk about his own formative experiences. Or, he doesn't trust language itself? I do believe that there are things in our lives that are like the sun. We can't look directly at them, so we build little devices that allow us to look at them askance. A pinhole camera, a metaphor, an entire career. Why not?
But also: Some things are simple and can be served by the richness of simple words. (I'm remembering when someone said the song "Without You" from RENT was basic, and my friend and fellow RENT-head said, "Sometimes grief is really simple.") Grief is NOT simple, but also it is. You can say "my mom died and it broke me" (my mom died; it broke me). Dillon never quite does. There's something sort of...squinty? about this memoir. It's a love letter to literature that holds people—the subject of so many beloved books—at arm's length.
Maybe at this point I'm more influenced by psychoanalysis and Instagram pop psychology than I am by postmodern theory, but I got the sense that Dillon doesn't trust himself to talk about his own formative experiences. Or, he doesn't trust language itself? I do believe that there are things in our lives that are like the sun. We can't look directly at them, so we build little devices that allow us to look at them askance. A pinhole camera, a metaphor, an entire career. Why not?
But also: Some things are simple and can be served by the richness of simple words. (I'm remembering when someone said the song "Without You" from RENT was basic, and my friend and fellow RENT-head said, "Sometimes grief is really simple.") Grief is NOT simple, but also it is. You can say "my mom died and it broke me" (my mom died; it broke me). Dillon never quite does. There's something sort of...squinty? about this memoir. It's a love letter to literature that holds people—the subject of so many beloved books—at arm's length.
Review of advance copy received from Publisher
Kindred.
June 9, 2026
A book about forming ideas, reading and becoming. Coming-of-mind? A literary and intellectual Bildungsroman. Brian Dillon makes you want to become smarter.
August 21, 2026
More likely, I will write about this book on my Substack page, but I have decided not to give out star ratings anymore. Books change for me; I can find fault while reading a book, but change my mind a year or decades later. Every book I have read has always been of great interest to me. Even the ones I don't like can mean a lot to me. But yeah, I just want to get past that star system and really get into the book's pace, style, skill, and, of course, everything else.
May 8, 2026
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.
July 29, 2026
Currently freaking out over grad school applications, and this has actually made me stress a bit less. Dillon helps elucidate that everyone struggles and there is always something to come (even if it’s different from what you’ve imagined for yourself)! Something doesn’t have to come naturally for it to be deeply important or of interest to someone!!
Also the Derek Jarman/Walter Benjamin comparison is so interesting to me, I’ll be thinking about that for a while.
Also the Derek Jarman/Walter Benjamin comparison is so interesting to me, I’ll be thinking about that for a while.
May 10, 2026
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.
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.
July 24, 2026
Reading an author's books can be like making a friend. After a while, novelty settles into familiarity: their stories become anecdotes, their quirks endearments. Brian Dillon's Ambivalence, a memoir dramatizing his cultural and aesthetic education, is only the third book of his that I've read, but he's already become one of these author-friends. Two of the three epigraphs (yes, he loves epigraphs; one by Roland Barthes and another by Elizabeth Hardwick) felt almost perfunctory, given the eulogies Dillon makes to these authors in Suppose a Sentence and Essayism. I noticed little stylistic tics and repetitions from previous books (phrases "at the level of form", the way he corrects or interrogates something he just said in parentheticals), hearing them as I read in his narrow, mannered Irish accent. Like Essayism, this book explores how the enthralling aesthetics of surfaces are used to cope with a deep personal melancholy.
But I was charmed by this book. As Dillon captures his fascinations with French theory, indie music, and the counterculture so evocatively, the past feels just a little closer, a little more tactile. He tells the story third person present tense, referring to himself as "B", with the full names of friends and authors tapering into compact, talismanic initials. (Roland Barthes becomes RB.) There is somehow both a distance and an immediacy to the events recounted in this paratactic constellation. Dillon uses italics often as a way to lightly ironize or stylize a phrase or description. And he will often point forward to events that haven't happened yet ("He does not yet know that...") in a kind of metaphorical italics, the narrative tilting towards futurity. Dillon is also lovingly attentive to the covers and dust jackets of the books that changed his life, to the visual qualities of objects usually only talked about for what they contain.
A passage from early in the book:
But I was charmed by this book. As Dillon captures his fascinations with French theory, indie music, and the counterculture so evocatively, the past feels just a little closer, a little more tactile. He tells the story third person present tense, referring to himself as "B", with the full names of friends and authors tapering into compact, talismanic initials. (Roland Barthes becomes RB.) There is somehow both a distance and an immediacy to the events recounted in this paratactic constellation. Dillon uses italics often as a way to lightly ironize or stylize a phrase or description. And he will often point forward to events that haven't happened yet ("He does not yet know that...") in a kind of metaphorical italics, the narrative tilting towards futurity. Dillon is also lovingly attentive to the covers and dust jackets of the books that changed his life, to the visual qualities of objects usually only talked about for what they contain.
A passage from early in the book:
He goes around with a head full of phrases—a feast full of seriousness is in full swing inside him. He stares at the photographs in a book by RB, and pages back and forth from text to image, relishing what RB calls the matte quality of the stupidity visible on the face of the prince in Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible, and admiring the mode of thinking conjured by that phrase, which does a powerfully unexpected job of observation and translation. He would love to be able to speak or write a language that discerns and distorts with the same sounds, the same marks on the page. But he loves too the tone of a maxim, slogan or manifesto. So many secrets, so many unspoken excitements, so many scenes of disappointment, betrayal even, when he discovers his private thrills and enthusiasms are not shared—nor his fears, nor his lassitude—or finds that for others these things appear passing, trivial, adolescent after all. The beautiful ones / Always smash the picture / Always, every time.
Read
August 12, 2026Ambivalence: An Education is a deeply personal meditation on what it means to be educated not simply through institutions, examinations, or credentials, but through the books, art, music, films, and ideas that fundamentally alter the person encountering them. Brian Dillon turns the story of his adolescence and early adulthood into an intimate exploration of intellectual formation, grief, uncertainty, and the transformative power of reading.
The memoir begins with rupture. At sixteen, Dillon loses his mother and withdraws from schoolwork, even as another form of education quietly takes hold. Books, music, cinema, and television become his intellectual landscape. By the time he reaches university, he has already constructed an inner world shaped by avant-garde writing and radical ideas. The question then becomes whether formal academia can live up to the intellectual possibilities he has already discovered for himself.
The later loss of his father gives that question even greater emotional weight. Reading and writing are no longer simply intellectual pursuits; they become ways of understanding loss, identity, possibility, and the kind of life one might choose to build.
Dillon’s encounters with Virginia Woolf, Walter Benjamin, Samuel Beckett, Roland Barthes, and Jacques Derrida provide the memoir with an expansive literary dimension, but the book’s deepest subject is the effect of ideas on a developing self. His attraction to ambivalence, ambiguity, and androgyny becomes part of a larger argument for resisting simplistic answers and allowing uncertainty to become intellectually productive.
What makes Ambivalence especially timely is its defense of the humanities as something more consequential than an academic discipline. Dillon suggests that what we learn can change not only what we know, but who we become and potentially how we understand and reshape the world around us.
For readers of literary memoir, intellectual history, cultural criticism, and the humanities, the book offers something rare: an account of education that is simultaneously autobiographical, philosophical, and deeply alive to the possibilities of literature.
The memoir begins with rupture. At sixteen, Dillon loses his mother and withdraws from schoolwork, even as another form of education quietly takes hold. Books, music, cinema, and television become his intellectual landscape. By the time he reaches university, he has already constructed an inner world shaped by avant-garde writing and radical ideas. The question then becomes whether formal academia can live up to the intellectual possibilities he has already discovered for himself.
The later loss of his father gives that question even greater emotional weight. Reading and writing are no longer simply intellectual pursuits; they become ways of understanding loss, identity, possibility, and the kind of life one might choose to build.
Dillon’s encounters with Virginia Woolf, Walter Benjamin, Samuel Beckett, Roland Barthes, and Jacques Derrida provide the memoir with an expansive literary dimension, but the book’s deepest subject is the effect of ideas on a developing self. His attraction to ambivalence, ambiguity, and androgyny becomes part of a larger argument for resisting simplistic answers and allowing uncertainty to become intellectually productive.
What makes Ambivalence especially timely is its defense of the humanities as something more consequential than an academic discipline. Dillon suggests that what we learn can change not only what we know, but who we become and potentially how we understand and reshape the world around us.
For readers of literary memoir, intellectual history, cultural criticism, and the humanities, the book offers something rare: an account of education that is simultaneously autobiographical, philosophical, and deeply alive to the possibilities of literature.
September 23, 2026
This book surprised me.
A friend got it for me, simply based on the aesthetic of it: both how it looked and what the blurb had to say. I was touched to be seen in this way and I think that given that this was a gift, and one in this fashion, helped me connect more with this book than I would have otherwise.
On the face of it, this is not the type of book I should enjoy. A lot of it probably requires having experienced the same media and literature as Dillon to understand. I have not had the same consumption history. Yet it is a testament to Dillon's writing that even without that shared background, he can still communicate the sense of 'it'. What is 'it'? The sense, the vibe, the aesthetic (there's that word again). My command of the English language is nowhere near as powerful but I hope you understand what I am trying to communicate.
I should also push back against this appreciation, this connection, because the journey we see Dillon undertake has a whiff of privilege, of pretension, though he probably did not view it this way when he was in the thick of it. I can't however push back on this too much, for I now find myself on a similar journey, albeit much later in life. Now comes the time and the space to explore taste, to slowly understand that such a thing takes work to be defined, and to be found.
Ambivalence takes us on this journey and I found it a powerful work for how easy it is to relate to without the prerequisites you think you need.
A friend got it for me, simply based on the aesthetic of it: both how it looked and what the blurb had to say. I was touched to be seen in this way and I think that given that this was a gift, and one in this fashion, helped me connect more with this book than I would have otherwise.
On the face of it, this is not the type of book I should enjoy. A lot of it probably requires having experienced the same media and literature as Dillon to understand. I have not had the same consumption history. Yet it is a testament to Dillon's writing that even without that shared background, he can still communicate the sense of 'it'. What is 'it'? The sense, the vibe, the aesthetic (there's that word again). My command of the English language is nowhere near as powerful but I hope you understand what I am trying to communicate.
I should also push back against this appreciation, this connection, because the journey we see Dillon undertake has a whiff of privilege, of pretension, though he probably did not view it this way when he was in the thick of it. I can't however push back on this too much, for I now find myself on a similar journey, albeit much later in life. Now comes the time and the space to explore taste, to slowly understand that such a thing takes work to be defined, and to be found.
Ambivalence takes us on this journey and I found it a powerful work for how easy it is to relate to without the prerequisites you think you need.
July 27, 2026
Part intellectual autobiography, part memoir, this most recent Fitzcarraldo release allows the curtain to be pulled away from one of their prized critics: Mr. Brian Dillon. I picked this up because I very much enjoyed his shortform selections of great prose in Essayism. After reading this I would say he was a man who was able early to read the wind and whilst dealing with great internal and external ambivalence measure his way to a position of relevance. Reading the David Bowie charged feeling of androgynous spirit of the age in the air he brandished his intellect and brought this ontological agnosticism to bear on the field of literary studies, riding the wave of postmodern posturing and pastische that came with it into the English department and beyond. It is interesting to get a feel for the development of criticism through the decades and I have to say that late 70’s to early 90’s Irish academia was not an angle that I was expecting to come to grips with. I do have to say that it has left me somewhat ambivalent, and certainly about the question if me and Mr. Dillon would have been friends at University, I would rather deconstruct myself.
September 12, 2026
erm too relatable lol
I read this over the past two days as I've had a head cold of oscillating intensity so my lucidity during my reading of this was rather here and there. so my thoughts on it are not particularly concrete. but I did enjoy inhabiting the "texture" this book creates. It's an autobiography/essay/"bildungsroman" about his education and life from ages 16-26, split into seven sections, each made up of unconnected paragraphs. this form makes it easy to slide into and out of. Most of the sections concern a 2-year period of the author's life. One of them is entirely about his relationship with the novel 'The Waves' by Virginia Woolf. Most of it is about his relationship with texts & media as he grew up. The book basically consists of a list of his reading during this period of his life. I've written up quite a long reading list from it. I'll be seeking out more Brian Dillon in the future. I'm glad to have found this by happenstance on the shelf in my grandparents' house.
I read this over the past two days as I've had a head cold of oscillating intensity so my lucidity during my reading of this was rather here and there. so my thoughts on it are not particularly concrete. but I did enjoy inhabiting the "texture" this book creates. It's an autobiography/essay/"bildungsroman" about his education and life from ages 16-26, split into seven sections, each made up of unconnected paragraphs. this form makes it easy to slide into and out of. Most of the sections concern a 2-year period of the author's life. One of them is entirely about his relationship with the novel 'The Waves' by Virginia Woolf. Most of it is about his relationship with texts & media as he grew up. The book basically consists of a list of his reading during this period of his life. I've written up quite a long reading list from it. I'll be seeking out more Brian Dillon in the future. I'm glad to have found this by happenstance on the shelf in my grandparents' house.
Read
July 31, 2026“He is always imagining how things will be in about six months' time: how he will dress, how he will speak and move in the world, what adjustments he will have made to his character and how he will be understood by oth-ers-perhaps even loved. And alongside these fantasies, how much he will have read, but more exactly the ways his reading will have sharpened or subtilized his mind, speech, the possibility of writing. All aspects of this imaginary-intimate, social and intellectual-have in common an element of deftness, poise and dryness: ways of being that are no longer harried by anxiety, physical shame, absence of grace. As if everything about him, body, soul and mind, could become pure form and idea, as though he might dissolve into air itself and at the same time find himself perfectly safe, protected, whole at last. He is completely aware of the contradictions, and what such dreams suggest he truly fears.”
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
May 24, 2026
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.
September 23, 2026
Discovering this through an article was a gift. Ambivalence is an absolute gem of a memoir—it is a stunning, understated tribute to critical theory, literature, and the sounds that anchor us through grief.
A masterclass in intellectual autobiography.
A masterclass in intellectual autobiography.
June 22, 2026
So I’ve just never had an original experience once in my life huh
June 24, 2026
Good, if a bit slight; I also feel like any memoir of an authors adolescence and early 20s should probably have at least some sense of humour about themselves, which this book definitely lacks.
September 22, 2026
Digressive and dense , careful and articulate. Really interesting meditation on form and self mythologising that makes the pretentious memoir very likeable!
May 24, 2026
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.
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.
Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews