“I may be slightly autistic, like Rain Man, and that’s part of my superpower,” boasted Kanye West in a 2022 video, clad in a black ski mask which, coincidentally, makes it difficult to read or interpret his facial expressions. Kanye has a surprising foil in the writer Tao Lin, who regularly gets on Twitter claiming to have cured his autism. “I love that I cured myself of autism,” he wrote on March 28th. Just 9 days earlier, a Kanye-esque bout of accusatory flexing: “people like to question my view that I cured myself of autism.”
Why is one man’s superpower another man’s affliction? We’ll never get an answer from Kanye, whose Tron-bike focus has since moved on to the evils of the Mars corporation and their ever-growing Twix bars. But Tao Lin wrote a long and nearly scientific essay on the subject. To summarize, Lin rejects both nature and nurture—genetics and upbringing—as meaningful predictors of autism, preferring instead an alternative theory: that autism is a condition of our toxic surroundings, inhaled from a hyper-technologized, hyper-medicated atmosphere. You’ve heard the adage “everything gives you cancer”? Well. In just one paragraph of his essay, Lin lists some thirty-two ambient autism agents (among them MSG and acetaminophen), each with an accompanying citation pointing to journals of varying credibility. Arriving at his own condition, Lin describes himself as a gifted but uncomfortable child, cataloging a number of health and behavioral problems, before, rather suddenly, issuing the looming diagnostic: “By high school, I’d become much more autistic.”
Lin then embarks on a fairly boring and unconvincing auto-pathology (he stabs at defining his own “autistic literary aesthetic” as one that involves “using weird similes”), and accounts his self-treatment journey via pills prescription and recreational, beef fat, Aldous Huxley, and meditation.The self-cure stuff is almost completely uninteresting in its enumerative plainness (you might say it’s written in an autistic literary style); but the reasonable paranoia, the founded conviction that we’re eating and breathing and sleeping and working in a cloud of poisons, has an upsetting appeal. There’s hope, too, embedded there—if we can hobble far enough away, the air is cleaner.
This is what Tao Lin gets at in his 2021 novel Leave Society. As a compulsive self-diagnoser—I have diagnosed myself, accurately and falsely, with an army of maladies from Marfan Syndrome to testicular cancer to schizophrenia to anemia—I’m familiar with the psychological comforts and itch-scratchy need-fulfillment afforded by auto-pathology. We long for reassurance, to have our concerns and fears and doubts be managed by trained and expensive hands, rather than dismissed as nonsense. Medical problems are something we know, a concrete proxy for wishes that are harder to articulate, usually wishes from early childhood. If only I became seriously ill. Then Dad would take me seriously.
In Leave Society Li, Lin’s stand-in, makes several trips to visit his aging parents in Taiwan. The novel largely focuses on these visits and the months between them, which Li spends in his Manhattan apartment. In Taiwan, Li frets over his parents’ deteriorating health, and at home, over his own. Li’s obsession with health and alternative medicine (both ‘alternative’ and ‘medicine’ are loose terms here—Li’s main treatments are LSD and weed) is loud and overwhelming. Li is in a hypochondriacal prison of sometimes comical dimensions. “At six a.m., Li woke sweating from a nightmare in which people didn’t believe him on glyphosate toxicity,” writes Lin. If we are to take every one of Li’s concerns in Leave Society seriously, we will find ourselves standing in a constant storm of airborne toxins, cations, and radiation waves; all working together to make us sicker and inflict chronic pain. And given the degree to which Lin’s writing is autofictional, as well as the health and wellness bent of his Twitter presence, I’m inclined to believe that he does take them seriously, that each of Li’s health neuroses can be mapped directly onto Lin’s own.
This complicates my enjoyment of Leave Society. Read as a screed against urbanism and our modern technocratic epoch, it’s not very interesting. Most of Lin’s insights about “dominator models” of social organization and government conspiracies are regurgitated from fringe scholars, many of whom he quotes and cites directly, creating a sort of term-paper effect. It’s boring. But read as a story about a massively lonely and isolated person desperate to find a physical cure to a psychic pain, Leave Society is one of the most affecting pieces of contemporary literature I’ve read.
Though I suspect Lin’s intention was polemic, that Leave Society’s title is a directive, the novel is taken much better as a piece of fiction, with a neurotic obsessive protagonist who possesses an almost Proustian capacity for observation (though the direction of Li’s observations, inward instead of outward, creates an anti-Proustian sense of containment). Leave Society is funny and moving, and Lin’s style is flat to an extent that makes it wonderfully unclear when he’s joking, or if ‘joking’ is even on his radar. “Li stared out his window at the ocean, thinking about his microbiome,” funny, is delivered with the same frankness as Li’s many musings on death, “a microcosmic history—a personal untethering from time-paired matter.”
For the hypochondriac especially, Leave Society is best enjoyed as a well-conceived story of strength and inspiration. Li’s fantasy that he can ease his psychological burden, that he can feel better, by adjusting his relationships with food or the elements, or even by leaving society, is a familiar one. It’s taken to the extreme here, but every self-diagnoser believes this to some degree. Leave Society is a reminder that it’s important to see beyond the immediate. In musing on ‘awe,’ which, as Li has just discovered from reading a study, is strongly correlated with lower levels of inflammation; Lin writes, “He felt it by thinking about how a fetus who predicted nothing existed beyond the womb would be wrong…how there might be places as unknowable to people as dreams were to electrons.”