Modeled on Dante's
Divine Comedy
and riffing on Proust's
In Search of Lost Time
,
Iris Has Free Time
is a subtle, complicated, funny, bold, lyrical and literary book about youth, time, and what it means to grow up
“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,
charts a madcap, melancholic course through that curious age—one’s twenties—when childhood is over, supposedly. An instant classic and essential reading for anyone who has ever been young.