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Jill Soloway Wants It All

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<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/tao-lin-psychedelic-journeyman/"></div>At the end of Tao Lin’s first nonfiction book, Trip, the author is happy and stoned in Northern California. The journalistic memoir documents Lin’s radical lifestyle change following the depression and pharmaceutical drug addiction fictionalized in his previous novel, Taipei. The journey began with Lin watching over 30 hours of plant-based drug guru Terence McKenna making “small mouth noises” (McKenna’s term for human speech) on YouTube. In these hours, Lin learned that McKenna was excited by topics Lin had expressed in Taipei as sources of despair — drugs, technology, humanity, and the future.
At his death in 2000, Terence McKenna was, in his daughter’s words, “still deciding who he would be.” In life, he was an ethnobotanist, mystic, psychonaut, lecturer, author, and psychedelic plant advocate. According to this New York Times obituary, he was deemed the “Timothy Leary of the 90’s” by Mr. Leary himself. He was also <a href="http://www.endoriot.com/2014/09/5-short-terence-mckenna-videos-that.html">called</a> the “intellectual voice of rave culture.” Lin was drawn to “McKenna’s triangulating deviations into stand-up comedy and, as [he] experienced it, ‘fiction;’” the Times described McKenna as combining “a leprechaun&#8217;s wit with a poet&#8217;s sensibility.” Lin relates to these descriptions. “I do try to be funny,” he tells me on the phone in his trademark monotone. “And I like dry humor.”
McKenna’s work helped Lin escape from what he calls “society-wide degeneration,” the effects of which include “pain, confusion, dark humor” and a “kind of restlessness.” He did this by empowering himself with knowledge. (Lin tells me he’s uniquely qualified to “<a href="https://twitter.com/tao_lin/status/982408914749874176">recommend</a> things,” which he does frequently on Twitter, because he’s read “more than 150 non-fiction books” and “hundreds of scientific papers.”) Trip explains that by “self-consciously, note-takingly exercising and stretching in a variety of physical and mental states in the past three years,” Lin learned his muscles had been “‘unconsciously tensed’ for some unknown amounts of time.” This is an inevitable symptom of being a “twenty-first-century degenerate.” Publicly-owned companies, Trip explains, corrupted aboriginal wisdom regarding nutrition. Before a DMT trip towards the middle of the book, Lin and a friend discuss a Canadian dentist who concluded that modern people can’t fit all 32 teeth into our mouths neatly due to multigenerational malnutrition. This finding comforts Lin, who had always felt that his teeth and tongue were too big for his mouth.
In Trip, Lin takes care to distinguish drugs from psychedelics. Drugs are “more-habit forming,” whereas psychedelics “dissolve habits.” Drugs don’t cause mystical experiences or “guarantee relief from boredom,” rather they stop “feeling amazing” after the first few times and typically cause a comedown, or “take from the future.” Psychedelics awaken compassion. Lin writes: “Peaking on large doses of Adderall alone in my room, I’ve never sobbed while thinking fondly and lovingly about my parents, as I have on cannabis and psilocybin.”
Psychedelics also helped Lin as a writer, as tells me on the phone, because they enabled him to access emotions he’d never before experienced, like awe and wonder. Faced with these feelings, Lin was required to invent “new arrangements of words” to describe what he was experiencing. It’s a ongoing test, he says, particularly because psychedelics underscore the limitations of language. (He enjoys the challenge.)
After recounting Terence McKenna’s life in chapters like “Mushrooms and Marriage” and “Books and Divorce,” Trip becomes more personal. Lin applies what McKenna taught him in four sections named for the following plant-based drugs: Psilocybin, DMT, Salvia, and Cannabis. On Psilocybin, Lin deletes his website and throws away his computer. On DMT, he experiences various degrees of paranoia and connection with his “internet friend Tracy,” who is visiting New York for a conference on psychedelics. During the trip, Lin becomes convinced Tracy is both a CIA agent and “a person who hated me.”
As evidenced in all of his books, Lin is skilled at documenting the unique discomforts of social interaction. I ask how he deals with the fact that plant-based drugs seem to magnify his discomfort, via things like inappropriate laughter and paranoia. Lin explains that while these drugs can intensify social anxiety, they only do so for brief moments, which he later finds amusing. In Trip’s epilogue, which he edited from first to third person in order to explore “Terence McKenna’s idea that the main thing people should realize is that we’re all imprisoned in some kind of work of art, ” Lin tells an inane lie to McKenna’s former wife Kathleen Harrison about turmeric while high on cannabis. He reflects:
[Lin] looked away and felt disappointed in himself and confused—he wouldn’t formulate a theory on why he’d suddenly lied until examining this situation later in prose—but then recovered almost instantly from the convoluted faux pas that now seemed okay and at least partially amusing. He reminded himself he lived in relative hermitude and that his brain and mind were broken in thousands to millions of ways, that his temporary malfunction wasn’t unexpected. It was expected and so could be meta-experienced and, in various ways, enjoyed.
On the phone, Lin tells me: “while I’m stoned I have access to more thoughts, so that can make social anxiety worse, but I’m also enjoying everything more and more interested in more things, and that takes me away from thoughts that give me anxiety.” He continues, “I’m more interested in the world. And that encourages me to talk more. And I can just enjoy it. And that reduces social anxiety.”
In a section entitled, “Why are Psychedelics Illegal?” Lin weaves the history of psychedelics and their criminality with his own personal experience serving on a federal grand jury. Here, Lin matter-of-factly pinpoints, without sensationalizing, the criminal justice system’s problematic underpinnings. At one point, Lin asks the prosecutor how the police “learned of the defendant,” afterwards thinking to himself, “Poor minorities seemed more likely to be targeted than, say, college students living in dorms.” Before the prosecutor’s response, Trip includes a quote from the Assistant to President for Domestic Affairs under Richard Nixon in 1994: “we knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities.”
Then prosecutor responds, chillingly: “He isn’t going to be able to tell you that.”
I ask Lin on the phone about this experience. “Normally I wouldn’t ask that question,” he tells me. “But I felt motivated because I knew I was going to write about it, and because I was really stoned on an edible.”
The epilogue demonstrates how plant-based drugs have rendered Lin “happier and healthier” than he’s ever been, as he concludes in the book’s final pages. In San Francisco, he skips along the hills of North Beach, reflecting that society views skipping as childlike and feminine. But unlike the rest of us, Lin is unafraid of what has been labeled feminine. Through McKenna, Lin learned about the ancient goddess religion; from 40-12,000 years ago, societies worshipped only female deities. It wasn’t until 7,000 years ago, when what Riane Eisler called “dominator cultures” began, that societies began worshipping male deities. This knowledge positively altered Lin’s view of human history, which he’d previously thought “had always been male-dominated and war-obsessed.” Now, he believes humans are recovering from the dominator cultures, and trending back towards a more matriarchal and partnership-based organization. Accordingly, while visiting Harrison, Lin reflects that his book “would trend toward the feminine,” evolving “from yang to yin, dead to alive, Terence to Kathleen.” When reading this, I couldn’t help but find Lin a bit prophetic, as he ostensibly wrote this before the mass patriarchy-toppling of 2017. #TimesUp on dominator cultures.
In the epilogue, Terence McKenna’s son Finn says to the author: “you’re really into this quantitative thing, aren’t you?” It gives voice to the reader’s thoughts. For 189 pages, Lin has painstakingly measured everything from historical eras to his drug intake to his exercise routine. “The Mazatec shaman Maria Sabina,” Lin tells me at one point on the phone, “she lived until her 90s.” (I believe he was trying to prove a point about the health benefits of plant-based drugs.) I ask another, unrelated question, Lin tells me after a long pause: “Sorry, Maria Sabina actually only lived to 89.” Lin is nothing if not meticulous, but that’s not to say this book is devoid of feeling. Fellow author and Lin’s friend Sam Pink wrote in his Goodreads <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2224298445">review</a> that he believes Trip “will help shift our gloomy tides,” and I hope he’s right.
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<h6>Image of author by Noah Kalina</h6>
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Tao Lin, Psychedelic Journeyman

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<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/melissa-broders-pisces-light-end-spiral/"></div>“It’s so mean that I can’t fuck the moon,” Melissa Broder tells me on the phone. We’re discussing her debut novel, the Pisces, in which her protagonist fantasizes about getting carnal with palm trees and the crescent moon. Anyone familiar with Broder’s Twitter feed, @SoSadToday, her Vice column and essay collection of same name, or her poetry collections Scarecrone and Last Sext, will recognize Broder’s lust for the unattainable. As @SoSadToday once <a href="https://twitter.com/sosadtoday/status/739534824805965824">tweeted</a>: “i came, i saw, i got emotionally attached to unavailable people.” In The Pisces, Broder revisits this theme through her protagonist’s romantic tryst with a merman.
For nine years, Broder’s protagonist Lucy has been in Phoenix writing her PhD dissertation on Sappho, a famously fragmental Greek poet: most of her work is now lost. After a bad breakup, Lucy moves to Los Angeles for the summer to dog-sit for her sister. Lucy joins group therapy for love addiction and embarks on a bleak Tinder spree, but finds little respite from the great weight of existence. Lucy yearns to fill the void left by her mother’s death, a void symbolized by Sappho’s missing poetry. While lingerie shopping, she imagines joining “Sappho’s all-female cult of Aphrodite.” “I craved that nurturing,” she thinks to herself. “But I was afraid to ask women for it, afraid they would die or reject me in some other way. So I looked for it in men who could not give it.” Because her crushes are mere fantasy, Lucy finds more pleasure preparing for the dates — in activities ranging from buying clothes to cleaning her ass — than she does with the men in real life. While reading I thought of a <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/Bb2bi7EhTAT/?hl=en&amp;taken-by=willowsmith">drawing</a> I saw on Willow Smith’s Instagram, on which a witchy woman’s vagina tells her: “You’re just using the idea of him to fall in love with yourself again.”
On the phone, Broder introduces me to the concept of “<a href="https://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-sack-md/limerence_b_1627089.html">limerence</a>,” a biochemical process that produces euphoria during the early stages of love. This is why they say “love is a drug,” she explains. The euphoria typically begins to normalize between six and 24 months into a relationship. But if you’re with someone emotionally unavailable, Broder tells me, someone “who is not the nicest and always keeps you on your toes in a bad way…then you can sustain that addictive limerence quality.” When you’re truly intimate with someone, Broder explains, it’s not going to feel like a drug.
“Is that depressing to you?” I ask.
“Yeah,” she says. “That’s why I keep writing about it.”
When Lucy falls for Theo the merman, the narrative drifts into magical realism and gives life to Lucy’s insatiable appetite for projection: “How empty was I that I needed a border drawn by someone else to tell me who I was? It didn’t even matter whether the person was real, a lover, a new friend, or even a dog […] Seeing myself through the eyes of a projection […] was like a box in which to live: a boundary against the greater nothingness.” As Broder wrote in her 2015 essay collection So Sad Today, “My sexual preference is me. Actually, escaping me.” The Pisces likewise depicts a woman projecting both the good and the bad aspects of herself outwards in an effort to avoid the reality of herself, much in the way the Greeks created myths.
“I’ve never been super into mer-creatures,” Broder tells me on the phone. “If I could choose a mythological creature, it would definitely be something more horse-related. Like, not to fuck. But just, you know. A pegasus probably. That’s probably the mythological creature I’d want to chill with.”
Broder chose a merman as the object of Lucy’s love after reading Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s “The Professor and the Siren,” a short story about a man’s relationship with a mermaid. Broder was sitting on the beach in Venice, where she used to live, and where Lucy lives for most of the novel. Watching the waves, Broder began thinking about the history of stories about men and mermaids. “Men are always walking off the back of ships for these mermaids,” she said. “And they’re sublimating themselves into the ocean for love. And it’s like death for love.” Anyone familiar with Broder’s work can understand why this notion seduced her; as <a href="https://twitter.com/sosadtoday/status/932505066204008448">expressed</a> on @SoSadToday: “i either think about you or think about death.” In a characteristic opposition of convention, Broder reversed the gender roles and wrote about a woman and a merman. (It’s worth noting that the The Pisces comes out the same year that The Shape of Water won Best Picture for portraying a woman’s relationship with a fish-creature, with whom she sacrifices her life and returns to the ocean for, well, love.)
Broder challenges the traditional gender tropes of mermaid stories in more ways than one. In the throes of erotic pleasure, Lucy compares Theo to a woman. The ocean strikes her as vaginal; she feels maternal when Theo comes. Given these elements and Lucy’s obsession with Sappho (and the qualifier that I can read queer undertones in a fast food menu), I ask Broder whether Lucy harbors suppressed lesbian desires.
“I think Lucy is pretty hetero,” Broder tells me, but she does not deny the novel’s queerness. “I think there is an element of looking at men from a non-binary perspective. Like when she’s fucking Theo, it’s regardless of gender.” She continues: “it’s like two halves of a whole, but it doesn’t matter who has which part.”
The cultural zeitgeist tells us things are either one way or another. They are black or white. Hot or cold. Good or bad. Art — successful art — tells us that multiple, seemingly contradictory things can exist at once. This <a href="http://www.dictionary.com/browse/polarity">polarity</a> is a common thread in Broder’s work; at one point, Lucy thinks to herself: “So many things were both true and a lie, depending on how you felt in the moment.”
The novel depicts a similar tension regarding Lucy’s relationship to popular therapy trends. Like Broder herself, Lucy suffers in a way that makes it necessary for her to try everything — therapy, medication, new age healing. But she&#8217;s also smart enough to see through the cracks, like when Lucy decides her therapist is stupid for continuing to quote E.E. Cummings, and when she realizes that her crystal is just a rock. She mocks terms like “self-dating” and “inner-child work,” and at one point concludes: “I did not want to do any more connecting with myself.” When I ask Broder about this tension, she tells me about a former therapist who wasn’t really doing it for her. She thought to herself: “Compared to death, she’s like a hairbrush.”
At one point, Lucy envies a couple for their seeming ease with existence: “If they had tasted the nausea of not knowing why we were here or who we are, or if they had not, now they were wilfully and successfully ignoring it. Or maybe they were just stupid. Oh, the sweet gift of stupidity. I envied them.” When I mention this scene to Broder on the phone, she’s quick to avoid judgment. “We’re all at some points in our lives those people.” She pauses. “When I’m at Sephora, I am those people.”
The worst feeling, Broder explains, is to look at the world and go “fuck, this is all real. That is so scary.” She calls this being “unable to lift the veil.” At one point in the novel. Lucy looks at her friend Claire from group therapy, sees her own dysfunction, and begins to spiral. Reading The Pisces mimics this feeling, the same one that @SoSadToday’s 626,000 followers know well. I tell Broder that to read her work is to feel: “I’m not alone, but also I’m terrified of who I am.” It’s tempting to read it feel depressed. Not only by her suffering, but by our own reflected back at us.
But there is light at the end of the spiral.
“This is a book that very much believes, as I believe,” Broder tells me, “in the power of women to save your life.” Ultimately, Lucy lifts the veil and survives by forming genuine bonds with the women around her, by creating her own DIY cult of Aphrodite. In among the novel’s most powerful scenes, Lucy is able to nurture herself without the drug of romantic obsession simply by playing with her sister’s hair. And it is in seeing herself in Claire that allows Lucy to accept herself and, ultimately, change. “There is a profound power when women are honest with each other,” she tells me. In following Lucy — charming, candid, and hilarious in a way Broder is herself — the reader gathers courage to take on the daunting but critical task of looking honestly within and moving towards change.
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Melissa Broder’s The Pisces: There is Light at the End of the Spiral

Melissa Broder’s The Pisces: There is Light at the End of the Spiral

Anna Dorn is a writer and attorney living in Los Angeles. Follow her on Twitter <a href="https://twitter.com/___adorn">@___adorn</a>.