Written in a coy third person (“He cares, but what does he know?”), Ambivalence conjures Thatcher-era Dublin in all its tatterdemalion charm. Dillon’s mother, a “desperately pious” Catholic, died in 1985. His father, a retired civil servant, died five years later

OURS IS THE era of Everybody’s Autobiography and, so far, 2026 has not disappointed, with a surfeit of memoirs by politicians, actors and rock celebrities. Mostly they amount to solipsistic spouting: the writing is not up to standard. However, one memoir I have been looking forward to is Ambivalence by Brian Dillon. In glancingly allusive prose, Dillon conjures his native Dublin in the 1980s and 1990s, when he lost both his parents to illness but found consolation in literature. The book’s amalgam of confession, anecdote and essay borrows from the example set by the French literary theorist Roland Barthes. Pages of ironical, self-reflexive commentary (“No matter how bad things get, I must never have a full-time job”) combine with mandarin contemplation of Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett and, along the way, the role of language in our lives.

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