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	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
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Memoirs

IRIS HAS FREE TIME

Iris Smyles

Fresh out of college and on her own in Manhattan, Iris narrates an exuberant, comic and wistful picaresque about the struggles of growing up. A touching evocation of youth in its twilight, a celebration and also a farewell, Iris Has Free Time is a paean to the beauty, sadness and joys of youth on the long eve of adulthood.

Whether passed out drunk in The New Yorker’s cartoon office where she’s interning; tanking her first job interview, assigning Cliff’s Notes when hired to teach humanities at a local college; aspiring to write the great American novel but settling for a blog about her ex-boyfriend’s penis instead; trying to piece together the events of yet another puzzling blackout—“I prefer to call them pinkouts, because I’m a girl”—Iris is never short on misadventures. From quarter life crisis to the shock of turning 30, Iris charts a madcap, melancholic course through her rocky entry into the real world. Iris Smyles fiction and essays have appeared in Nerve, New York Press, McSweeny's Internet Tendency, Guernica, KGB BarLit, and BOMB among other publications, as well as several anthologies. She has a BA from NYU, an MA from Columbia University and an MFA from The City College of New York where she received several writing awards. She lives in New York.

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Book Published 2013-05-01 by Soft Skull

Comments

"Iris Has Free Time is a hilarious, lyrical and wise book about youth—its beauty, its folly, and the belief it will go on forever even as it's slipping away. You will love this book."

Delightful, dreamy, witty, sad, and always charismatically engaging and curious, Iris, the narrator and heroine of this tale, lets you into her heart and mind as she observes the passing of her youth and the shadow-like recession of her dreams and romances. In doing so, she makes one think of one's own youth and folly, and all the folly yet to come, because maybe the unspoken message of this story—and one I agree with—is that we never really grow up. At least I hope we don't.

Such a delight, this book: the perfect frenzied bildungsroman for an era when coming-of-age can be postponed practically to middle age, as funny and sharp as can be but unafraid of seriousness and consequence. It's The House of Mirth minus the no-way-out tragedy, Bright Lights Big City for the 21st century, Girls for people who love the deep dive into great prose.

Smyles, the author not the character, depicts a particular moment in time—that awkward place between being a kid and being an adult— and the results are often hilarious, often tinged with sadness, but always authentic.

If Hemingway's novels are icebergs, drifting majestically through a chilly sea, Iris Smyles's IRIS HAS FREE TIME is a mountain of glitter: iridescent, fabulous, and always changing its shape, it's a monument to the idea of fun, and is itself a delight.

Iris Smyles has reinvented Sally Bowles and Holly Golightly for the 21st century--with this difference: she inhabits rather than observes her appealing character.

It's hard to miss the surface parallels between Sex and the City and Iris Has Free Time… But it would be a mistake to dismiss Iris as a Candace Bushnell knockoff… the novel's deeper themes dovetail far more with Girls…What's more, it seems that unlike Carrie, Iris isn't about to sign herself up for an extra decade of Peter-Pandom. As she asks after surviving a series of benders, 'When did all these games stop being fun?'