While absently watching YouTube, he discovered Terence McKenna, the celebrated ethnobiologist and mystic who spent his life studying, consuming, and advocating for the use of psychedelic plants. In its introduction, he describes the “zombielike” state he found himself in after completing the final draft of Taipei in 2013. In 2018, Lin published Trip, his first book-length work of nonfiction. To understand this turn, it is worth considering the synaptic space that separates Leave Society from Lin’s last novel, Taipei. These references make Leave Society feel more capacious than Lin’s previous novels, which were tightly trained on their protagonists to the exclusion of most external perspectives. His reading habits have reoriented toward nonfiction, especially Merlin Stone’s book about goddess-worship, When God Was a Woman (1976), and Riane Eisler’s The Chalice and The Blade (1987), which suggests an alternative model for society: the prehistoric “partnership model,” when men and women lived peacefully in matrifocal households, as opposed to the “dominator model” that introduced war and sexism to the planet and which predominates today. He tries to engage with the natural world and struggles to be healthy. After finishing his third novel, the character Li retreats from his former lifestyle, viewing himself as recovering “not just from pharmaceutical drugs but from nearly everything.” Now, he consumes only cannabis, DMT, LSD, and psilocybin. In Leave Society, Lin introduces a radical shift in outlook, a change from a posture of boredom to one of awe. They pass their days engaged in minor acts of violence, casual drug use, and failed attempts at connection. Lin’s previous main characters were united through their bleak, depressive worldviews. Going out the window, leaving society, only gains significance - or, indeed, becomes fully real - once it is transmuted into metaphor, into text. Writing, in his view, is as important as living in fact, life is valuable mostly as something to be written about. Lin’s reading of “Willing” is a key to understanding his conception of his own work. For Lin, this release need only be metaphorical it is enough that Moore’s protagonist, Sidra, simply imagines going out the window to flee her unfaithful boyfriend.

At the end of a short story, readers expect, if not resolution, then at least something arresting - a feeling, a figure, an idea. If you type Tao Lin and Sarah Lawrence into Google, you will discover that Lin did teach a class on the contemporary short story there in 2015, which suggests that he and his protagonist are once again closely affiliated.

Each of his novels’ protagonists - Andrew in Eeeee Eee Eeee (2007), Haley Joel Osment in Richard Yates (2010), Paul in Taipei (2013), and now Li - arrive as flashing, partial representations of the author himself, bounded by the particular period of his life from which Lin draws them. Though often staging in her stories the question of which aspects of life should and should not be written about (especially in “People Like That Are The Only People Here,” which Lin has said “made me feel, more so than anything I had read before”), she draws a clear distinction between her life and her fiction: “I’m never writing autobiography,” she told The Paris Review in 2001 “I would be bored, the reader would be bored, the writing would be nowhere.” Lin does not share the same concerns. Moore is an interesting choice of lodestar for a writer like Lin. Though Li had read the story, “Willing,” “around ten times since college,” he had not realized, until then, that the last nine lines are intended to be taken literally rather than metaphorically: “She was gone, gone out the window, gone, gone.” In Lin’s fourth novel, Leave Society, his protagonist, Li, teaches one of Moore’s short stories to MFA students at Sarah Lawrence. TAO LIN HAS CITED Lorrie Moore as a major literary influence.

Leave society tao lin