Ambivalence

“Ambivalence tells the story of a mind making itself up, changing, deleting, willfully transforming itself. . . . This reader trusts people who doubt themselves and their ideas, and Ambivalence honors a productive and essential trust between writer and reader. This is an exceptional work.” —Lynne Tillman

“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 faint 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 Mysticism

“I’m taken aback and moved by the level of disclosure in Brian Dillon’s new book, Ambivalence. I read it in two sittings, riveted by the stories of youth told through books, music, film, and ultimately criticism. This taut narrative is a pitch perfect ratio of biography and theory, and an utterly delicious read.” —Moyra Davey

“Brian Dillon is one of the true treasures of contemporary literature—a critic and essayist of unmatched style, sensitivity and purpose.” —Mark O’Connell

“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

“[Ambivalence] is a strange, bewitching experiment in autobiography, in which there are no friendships or love affairs, just exquisite digressions on life-changing texts . . . I still believe that the songs or books we love contain blueprints for how we hope to live, and Dillon’s memoir embodies how these personal canons inflect the way we understand and express ourselves.”
—Hua Hsu, The New Yorker
“A poignant and sometimes very funny account of a life in late 1980s and early 1990s Dublin and an elegy for the revolutionary force of an education gleaned through wide and close readings of music and style magazines, German films and French theories . . . The book is filled with moments of joy . . . Ambivalence foregrounds the wrongheadedness of youth but never judges it; in fact, it celebrates it.” —Colm McAuliffe, Irish Times

“[Ambivalence is] a careful account of self-development through art . . . the book is a page-by-page pleasure . . . So strong is [Dillon’s] passion for his way of finding himself in the world, so dedicated is he to be true to his idols, that we long for him to make it. And this book is proof that he did.” —John Self, Financial Times