Taipei is the 29-year-old’s seventh book and his first with a major publisher (Vintage Books, a division of Random House). “I’ve been here fifteen minutes and this is already getting dark,” I say. Or the average person who binge drinks every night and eats shitty food, or people who are in war …” These drugs sometimes, I think, aren’t as unhealthy or as extreme at all compared to, like, single mothers with two kids who sleep three hours a night. * “I will probably die soon,” he says, moving at slothlike pace. He laughs, holding up two stamp-size squares of DMT. Lin fumbles with a few plastic boxes containing, he says, Adderall, Xanax, heroin, cocaine, Percocet, Trazodone, Tramadol. Five minutes into the party, Lin suggested that we go back to his place and just get on with it: I could observe his regular routine of taking drugs and not sleeping … and just write about that. He had invited me so that we could chat about this profile I wanted to write about him. Lin and I had met up earlier that evening at a magazine party at the Jane Hotel.

I’m just, like, organizing my Gmail account for six hours.” Sleeping reset that intimacy … I don’t even really have a reason to stay up anymore, but I don’t not have a reason either. “The longer I was awake the more intimate I felt with the novel. He is pushing around the 120 milligrams of Adderall he will take at some point tonight. His eyes are glimmery, and his DIY haircut is fuzzy and discordant. Lin sits at a vanity turned desk, decorated with melted candles and lightbulbs covered in wax. There are rainbow Christmas lights across the wall and floor, and jagged mirrors appropriated from the street. “That would be a good framing device and I think you will be able to tell when I am peaking and coming down on Xanax or whatever.” We are sitting in Lin’s studio apartment in Murray Hill. “While writing Taipei, I got into this habit of taking Adderall and staying up all day and night,” says the novelist Tao Lin.

Bed tao lin