Trip: Psychedelics, Alienation, and Change

by Tao Lin

Overview

Part memoir, part history, part journalistic exposé, Trip is a look at psychedelic drugs, literature, and alienation from one of the twenty-first century's most innovative novelists—The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test for a new generation. A Vintage Original.

While reeling from one of the most creative—but at times self-destructive—outpourings of his life, Tao Lin discovered the strange and exciting work of Terence McKenna. McKenna, the leading advocate of psychedelic drugs since Timothy Leary, became for Lin both an obsession and a revitalizing force. In Trip, Lin's first book-length work of nonfiction, he charts his recovery from pharmaceutical drugs, his surprising and positive change in worldview, and his four-year engagement with some of the hardest questions: Why do we make art? Is the world made of language? What happens when we die? And is the imagination more real than the universe?

In exploring these ideas and detailing his experiences with psilocybin, DMT, salvia, and cannabis, Lin takes readers on a trip through nature, his own past, psychedelic culture, and the unknown.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781101974513
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	05/01/2018
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Tao Lin is the author of the novels Taipei and Richard Yates and Eeeee Eee Eeee, the novella Shoplifting from American Apparel, the story collection Bed, and the poetry collections cognitive-behavioral therapy and you are a little bit happier than i am. He was born in Virginia, has taught in Sarah Lawrence College's MFA program, and is the founder and editor of Muumuu House.

Table of Contents

Introduction 3

Why Am I Interested in Him? 13

Terence McKenna's Life 27

My Drug History 45

Psilocybin 69

DMT 91

Salvia 139

Why Are Psychedelics Illegal? 153

Cannabis 187

Epilogue 219

Appendix 285

Acknowledgments 295

Bibliography 297

Editorial Reviews

Trip is, if not a guide to self-help, a book about a person trying to be happier, in part by changing the kinds of drugs he uses. . .another theory of psychedelics emerges, which suggests that the most mystical revelations concern earthly themes: birth, death, and the body; family, friends, and love.” —Emily Witt, The New Yorker
 
“Trip is a sane book about becoming sane, and Lin’s most valuable work to date.” —The Irish Times
 
"[Lin does] an incredible job describing what a psychedelic experience feels like." —The Village Voice

“An immediately significant entry in the literature of derangement and recovery.” —Vulture, “The Best Books of the Year (So Far)”

“[Lin’s] best yet. . . . His rendering of tripping is perfect—better even. . .than Aldous Huxley’s elegant and evocative passages in The Doors of Perception, because Lin’s account conveys reverence and immersion without grandiosity. And that allows humor to leak through. . . . A joy to read.” —Bookforum

“Addictive…. Strikingly vivid…. Lin coherently challenges the sense behind labeling psychedelics as controlled substances…. A kaleidoscopic fever dream of ideas, idolatry, and lots of drugs: uniquely produced and curiously intoxicating.” —Kirkus Reviews

“An introspective work…. [Lin] chronicles his experiences with various psychedelic drugs in his first nonfiction book, weaving autobiography, history, and spiritual journey together to pose existential questions.” —Publishers Weekly

“Trip is not only a book about drugs—it's about the condition of humans at this point in history, troublingly divorced from our natural capacity for awe by our chemically depleted bodies and minds. This book has changed how I understand myself on a cellular level. It's a superbly researched, moving, and formally inventive quest for re-enchantment, and Tao Lin's most compelling and profound book yet.” —Sheila Heti, author of How Should a Person Be?

"Trip transcends the ranks of drug memoirs to give us a characteristically nontraditional, completely unique, hilarious, tender, and at times frightening departure from everyday life such as only Tao Lin can write. With fascinating specificity, it asks essential questions about the nature of time, reality, consciousness, and the self, while holding a looking glass up to contemporary life, to ask, Is this really all there is?—and to answer, No, the possibility for knowledge is endless, and we should never cease searching." —Sarah Gerard, author of Sunshine State

“Similar to the psychedelic drugs Tao Lin writes about here, this book introduces new ways to consider language, perception, and recovery. It’s a joy to watch Lin interrogate his obsessions so earnestly and thoroughly in an attempt to understand more about the world as he knows it. Trip is a book for anyone interested in learning about what the human mind is capable of seeing and believing.” —Chelsea Hodson, author of Tonight I’m Someone Else

“Tao Lin took all the drugs so that we wouldn’t have to, and the result is astonishing, mind-expanding, beautiful, and profound. The whole of humanity seems contained in this one book.” —Kristen Iskandrian, author of Motherest

“Tao Lin’s writing reliably restores my sense of the inexhaustible strangeness of even one minute of human thought and feeling.” —Michael W. Clune, author of White Out

From the Publisher

2018-02-20
A drug-soaked excursion through addiction, psychedelics, and fascination with a visionary psychonaut.In his first full-length nonfiction book, Taiwanese novelist and poet Lin (Taipei, 2013, etc.) probes deep to expose his struggles with drug addiction and isolating depression, two suffocating encumbrances that threatened to extinguish his artistic creativity and even his life. In this peculiar yet addictive patchwork of memoir, biography, and meditative self-analysis, the author explores how studying pro-psychedelic mystic Terence McKenna (1946-2000) liberated him from an amphetamine, psilocybin mushroom, and opiate-fueled "zombielike" state while finishing the final draft of his previous novel. Lin's fixation with McKenna forms the core of the narrative and the center around which a lot of his life-altering revelations are based. The author briskly escorts readers through McKenna's nomadic life as a self-proclaimed "hardheaded rationalist," and he explores his visions, public talks, and imaginative interpretations with encyclopedic thoroughness. Both Lin and McKenna shared a preoccupation with psychedelics, but the author's own drug history also encompassed Adderall, methadone, MDMA, and opiates. Lin's depiction of his magic mushroom and DMT trips are strikingly vivid. Over time and with varied use, those two psychoactive indulgences proved the most intensely transformative for both Lin and McKenna. Lin coherently challenges the sense behind labeling psychedelics as controlled substances, agreeing with McKenna's declaration that the government made them illegal because they dissolve "opinion structures and culturally laid down models of behavior and information processing. They open you up to the possibility that everything you know is wrong." Lin also writes thoughtfully about cannabis, "the plant I've had the closest relationship with so far in my life." A decade after McKenna succumbed to cancer, Lin visited his guru's former wife, which he recounts in a bizarre epilogue that is as buzzed, foggy, meandering, and eccentric as the rest of this unconventional memoir.A kaleidoscopic fever dream of ideas, idolatry, and lots of drugs: uniquely produced and curiously intoxicating.

Kirkus Reviews