Life Writing

The author of seven works of poetry and fiction, most recently the novel Taipei, Tao Lin is known for being divisive. Reviewers have likened him to Ernest Hemingway and Knut Hamsun, and even called him 'The Kafka of the iPhone generation', but others have called his writing 'awful', one likening the experience of reading his latest work to being “stuck in the dungeon of a literary sociopath.” Given his reputation, it comes as a surprise when Lin's voice down the phone from New York is quiet, his tone reserved. Lin is surprisingly laconic.

Taipei follows the adventures of Taiwanese-American writer Paul in the New York literary scene, in his parents' hometown - the titular city - and on a mind-bending array of drugs. Anyone familiar with Lin's background might spot the overlap between his protagonist's life and his own, and he's described the book as autobiographical, right down to his character's reliance on substances. For his part, Lin says the quantities of Adderall and other drugs he took whilst writing actually helped him: “I don't think they affected the content or the style. They just affected my motivation levels.”

Quizzed on where the boundary between Paul's story and his own life, Lin is ambivalent. “I used my memory as a first draft for the book. But then I wasn't just trying to put down my memories, I was willing to change things.” Using one's life as unadulterated source material can have its risks. “Now it's hard for me to remember if something really happened, or if I changed it to be that in the book ...” he admits. While some people might find the idea of losing the distinction between the past and their imagination disturbing, Lin is insouciant. “It doesn't worry me.” He stops to think. “I don't think it matters.”

Known for creating characters whose lives are permeated by the Internet, there's also an awful lot of Lin himself on the web; google provides a sea of tweets, articles, stories, videos, poems and blogs by or about him. Though his public persona has proliferated online in a way impossible solely in print, Lin is sceptical about the idea his writing is itself fundamentally the product of a digital age, instead citing writers like Lorrie Moore and Fernando Pessoa as key to his development. “All of my influences, or most of them, are people who were born in the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s. I don't have any influences that are just all on the Internet. So [without the 'net] my books would be almost the same.”

Lin frequently gets slapped with the “voice of a generation” label, but does he see himself as representative of his peers? “No. I'm very against that. I [only] view myself as part of a generation in, like, concrete terms. In that I'm born within certain dates.” So why do commentators so often depict him as more than that: a poster boy for urban, ironic and technology-obsessed twenty-somethings today? “Why do I think they do that? Umm ...” he takes another one of his long, long pauses. “What else would they say about me?”