A little while ago I emailed Tao Lin asking if he would send me a copy of his most recent novel, Leave Society. I told him that I wanted to read it and potentially write about it for my newsletter. He said he would. It arrived a couple of weeks later. I opened the package and flicked to the first page where Tao had drawn a picture of a friendly, seemingly peace-loving alien with big circular eyes and a tiny, moon-shaped mouth. "To Oscar, from Tao," the alien said in a speech bubble.
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I first read Tao's writing around a decade ago via screenshots and photos of his poetry that people shared on Tumblr. I liked his poetry because it was easy to comprehend, funny and relatable—the opposite of much poetry I was assigned to read at university. I bought his novels and liked them, too. His novels taught me that a hyper-vigilant and near-constant transcription of life as it is unfolding alongside a vague premise that such events are fictional is a way to generate literature—what people now call auto-fiction. I also liked that his descriptions of events and encounters were non-judgmental and precise, which gave the scenes in his novels concrete immediacy alongside moral ambiguity. In Shoplifting from American Apparel, the main character, Sam—Tao Lin's fictional avatar—gets locked up in a prison after stealing something from a shop. In prison there is a drunk man who calls one of the policemen the n-word. Two of the other prisoners threaten to kill the drunk man. “He's drunk, people are different when they're drunk," the African American policeman says in a shy voice. "He might sober up and be the nicest person you ever met."
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When Tao Lin visited Australia in 2013, as part of a writers festival tour, I was a Tao Lin fan and wanted to see him talk in Melbourne, where I lived, but the event sold out quickly. During his first stop in Brisbane, he tweeted that he wanted to buy some weed. I wrote him an email telling him that I could give him some weed when he came to Melbourne in exchange for tickets to his event at the Melbourne Writers Festival. He agreed. When he came to Melbourne I met him at his hotel, gave him weed, and then we smoked a little at my house. Afterwards, I wrote about giving Tao Lin weed, vaguely in the style of Tao Lin, and published my account of events in a newly formed online literary magazine. It was the longest and most auto-biographical piece of writing I had ever published. People told me it was funny and good. It seemed that I could keep writing like this, treat my life and everyone around me as material. I'd have to make my life interesting. I might need more conflict. Life would become more interesting through writing and writing more interesting through life. But the sacrifice might be exposure, shame, potentially alienation from people I loved. I started doing a PhD instead and abstracted my writing and intellectual effort away from my life and out into the world.
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Tao Lin's most recent novel, Leave Society, begins shortly after my encounter with him in Melbourne. It is 2014. Tao Lin’s fictional avatar in this novel, Li, is traveling back and forth between New York, where he lives, and Taiwan, where his parents live with their poodle, Dudu. He is trying to recover from a period of self-destructive drug use, failed relationships, and "pained disillusionment". After reading a book called The Chalice and The Blade, he now believes that humanity once lived together in cooperative, nature-worshipping, broadly egalitarian societies. At some point a long time ago, these societies were supplanted by other societies obsessed with domination, materialism, and prejudicial hierarchies, which ultimately gave rise to our present stage of civilization with its pesticides, corporations, and misogyny. That things had once been different gives Li hope that our wretched moment in history is a brief aberration. We will recover our former harmony or transcend into an entirely new phase altogether somewhere beyond history.
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Given that most people are still addicted to domination, Li must begin the journey to recovery on his own. He eats organic food, detoxes, does yoga, gets massage. He persistently encourages his parents to do the same and makes them get the mercury fillings removed from their mouths. He tries to be kinder and more empathetic towards them, too. He thinks about his childhood from his mother's perspective—remembering when his dad was briefly in jail and his brother away at college—and realizes that it must have been hard for her. He engages in "parent mediation", trying to help them stop bickering and treat each other with loving tenderness. He takes many doses of LSD and marijuana to facilitate insight, psychological novelty, joy, awe, emotional intensity, and access to something he calls "the mystery", a seemingly direct experience of reality before cultural mediation.
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Li is also trying to recover from a certain way of writing. He doesn't want to "specialize in embodying and languaging confused alienation anymore, as he had for a decade, writing existential autofiction." In other words, he doesn't want to write the type of novel that made me a Tao Lin fan. Autofiction, for Li, is often a symptom of Dominator Society. It chronicles "confused struggle in a grim world". It is confluent with being self-obsessed, exploitative of self and others, pushing the writer towards conflict to have something to write about. Li wants to experiment with writing a novel beyond this, a recovery novel. Some people think Leave Society is that novel: there are long, meandering passages where Li is just talking to his parents about who is going to take out the trash, for example, giving the book an almost ambient tone.
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But there is underneath this seeming calmness a definitive conflict in the novel, not so much between the characters but between Li and Tao Lin—the character and the writer. Because if Li is trying to leave society and find a new way of writing, Tao Lin is imposing order on his life through the techniques of autofiction. Tao Lin is constantly recording and transcribing Li's recovery, which imposes a kind of ironic distance to it. In fact, while I was reading Leave Society, I had the feeling that Li is maybe the most alienated of all of Tao Lin's fictional avatars. He explicitly wants to leave society and disappear. But he can't because Tao Lin insists on transforming this struggle into literature, making his journey to recovery into a commodity, a topic briefly trending with a certain group of people on Instagram. Autofiction is the final addiction. It can swallow anything, even sincere attempts at revolutionary recovery.
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The book ends with Li meeting a woman called Kay. They plan on moving to Hawaii together. Li realizes that he has changed in some ways during his recovery and will continue to change. Change will probably lead to more writing. While reading the last few pages, sitting on my front porch on one of the first warm spring days of the year, I imagined what might have happened if during the course of the novel Li had defeated Tao Lin finally and the book ended mid-sentence. Li just disappears out of the book, out of autofiction, out of society altogether, leaving no trace except for an incomplete manuscript, which his agent tries to sell, nonetheless. I was thinking this on a Saturday. I read the last page of Leave Society and then looked at my phone. I read a tweet about how it is best to die in spring. I liked it. I had written a tweet a few days earlier about how if you die in a good mood that's all that really matters, even if your life was miserable. I walked to the store, bought a beer, and then drank it on the porch. I felt dizzy from the alcohol and the sun. On my phone I read the story I wrote about giving Tao Lin weed back in 2013. I looked at my journal from that time and tried to get a sense of how things have changed since then.
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I wrote about how a friend came over for dinner. She just found out that her girlfriend of seven years cheated on her. She called her a psychopath. She also called the person her girlfriend cheated on with a psychopath, as well as her doctor, for some reason. She said to me, while we ate pasta, that when bad things happen in life you can either blame yourself or “investigate and seek justice.” She said that she was going to investigate and seek justice. The next day I went into the studio I was working in at the time. My friend there had recently come back from a long trip to India where he had spent many days taking LSD with a guru-seeming man in a city by a river. He was reading Osho. He told me that any perceived evil or injustice in the world is in fact a matter of perception. This meant that society, the world, the entire universe could undergo radical change in one night if the individual simply learned how to look at it differently. “It can go from bad to good in the blink of an eye.” The friend, a graphic designer and artist, also told me that there was a famous graphic designer coming to Melbourne to give a lecture he wanted to go to, but it was sold out. I suggested that he email this person and offer him weed in exchange for tickets. The famous graphic designer responded that he didn't "do that stuff" anymore but that he'd send along complimentary tickets.
I remember that first piece about Tao Lin. You also have that knack for non-judgmental writing Oscar, I really enjoy it. Thanks for sharing.
nice. so where should i start with tao? always wanted to read him but never have.