Iris Has Free Time

There, I came across a cluster of NYU graduates standing in cap and gown. They were laughing and posing for photos. Was it June again already? Their voices echoed through the subway tunnel. “Congratulations!” “Congratulations!” their parents said. And I wanted to yell, “Don’t do it! Go back! You don’t know what it’s like!” Whether passed out drunk at The New Yorker where she’s interning; assigning Cliffs Notes when hired to teach humanities at a local college; getting banned from a fleet of Greek Island ferries while on vacation, or trying to piece together the events of yet another puzzling blackout—“I prefer to call them pink-outs, because I’m a girl”—Iris is never short on misadventures. From quarter-life crisis to the shock of turning thirty, Iris Has Free Time charts a madcap, melancholic course through that curious age—one’s twenties—when childhood is over, supposedly. Iris Smyles has created in Iris Smyles an irresistible anti-heroine whose innocent iconoclasm startles as it charms.