Richard Yates
By Tao Lin
Publication Year: 2010
Type: god I wish this book were just fiction
Genre: self-aggrandizing filth written by an abusive predator
Read on 2019-09-26
View additional specs on this book in Muhan’s 2019 Reading Survey ➞
★☆☆☆☆
Apparently when this was first published in 2010, when Tao Lin was still a young person, hipsters still existed, and Instagram has just launched (try to remember the original filters and glossed-over-shaded-dimensional-icon aesthetic), it was hailed as some sort of timely literary representation of youth culture in a digital age.
The book is about a 22 year old unemployed depressive NYU grad writer sadboy who starts a relationship with a 16 year old girl in New Jersey. I’m about to tear this book apart for its themes and prose but please note that this is about a real relationship Tao Lin had with an underaged girl named Ellen Kennedy. The very light plot arc in which sadboy belligerently abuses underaged girl into a severe eating disorder and suicidal ideation is composed of them saying extremely boring things at each other in absolute monotone, primarily recounting activities they did or trying to arrange to meet up without the girl’s mom finding out, a prose style meant to represent or comment on the age of digital communication. This kind of vague moral panic/timidly edgy commentary on technology might have been passable in 1999, would certainly have been passé by 2010, in 2019 reads like the author is jerking off to his own artistically aloof disillusionment and self-absorbed sadness.
The first 140 out of 200 pages is a lot of repetitive and mindnumbingly, even psychopathically, monotone transcripts of him gaslighting her into berating herself for not anticipating his arbitrary mood swings, displeasing him by not dieting and exercising enough to stay sexually appealing to him, and performing extremely labor and time-intensive tasks (like drawing a 110-panel absurdist comic or going through every single DM and email to find and recant every lie she has ever told him) in order to only slightly amuse or appease him.
In 2014, Ellen Kennedy revealed on Twitter that not only was she in this exact physically and emotionally abusive relationship with Lin as a sixteen year old in 2005, but that Lin literally copy and pasted her verbatim emails from that period into this book. Lin responded in a truly pathetic Facebook post saying that he had consulted Kennedy while writing and publishing this book and then pretty explicitly implies that he thinks she was being hypocrite about it now (like it doesn’t take years for someone to process abuse), but that he was fully self-aware of his faults in that relationship (because he wrote about them in his #art), and that he was being the bigger person by privately offering to give her all the royalties or cease distribution. He ends with an insanely oblivious statement about how he’s only publicizing these private communications now because of the “massive shitstorm” of press calling him a rapist - like he didn’t fucking publish his own fucking confession already.
I only looked all of this up after I finished the book and made up my mind that it was bad on its own terms. Even disregarding Tao Lin’s real life actions (which I really don’t), this book is at best an irritating man’s self-aggrandizing autobiographical/artistic posturing, and at worst a profoundly damaging text for anyone to read - thoughtlessly, artlessly triggering to victims and women, and affirming to abusers and men.
@All men: re-presenting your abuse of women as art does not make your abuse of women art, it just makes you fucking stupid and still an abusive piece of shit.
If you’re still not convinced - please allow me to implore you once again in video form NOT to read this book.
