Miranda Schreiber's ​Iris and the Dead

Reviewed by Amanda Earl

(Book*hug Press, 2025)

​In July, I came down with an unnamed virus, could be a cold, could be Covid. Who knows? I was too weak and sick to do most things. When I was alone, I picked up one of the pile of books in my to-be-reviewed stack. I don’t know why I chose Iris and the Dead; maybe it was its evocative cover, a stark grey landscape boxed in a frame, above a second frame that housed an open hand with just the fingers showing, on a pastel pink background. Maybe it was the title “Iris and the Dead,” which suited my sombre mood. Whatever the reason, I devoured the book whole as if it was happening in the moment, and I was the one going through the tumultuous incidents in it. In between coughing and after sleepless nights, I read it. I found it to be a page-turner. Which is odd. Because most of it is a long letter written by a young woman to her therapist. The writer has an undiagnosed sickness that has caused her to lose her mind at age twelve. She writes to the woman who becomes her counsellor. This counsellor is only twenty-six and, when the narrator is eighteen, becomes her therapist, helps her to come out as queer, and fosters a level of intimacy that seems inappropriate between patient and doctor.
 
The entire time, I wanted to know why the narrator lost her mind and how she can get it back. It doesn’t seem possible, but eventually by increasing the dosage of her medication to a dangerous level, going against medical advice, she does. I was unable to put down the book because I was intrigued by the relationship dynamic between the counsellor and the narrator, how intensely the narrator felt, and I remember that feeling all too well. The counsellor seemed underwhelmed, but she did not try to maintain a professional distance either. If you’ve ever felt this intense wave of love for someone who is also controlling and pushing you away and pulling you in, you will relate to this book and empathize with how the narrator felt. If you’ve ever had or known someone who has had an undiagnosable illness, who has struggled with depression and other emotional difficulties, you will relate to this book.
 
One possible explanation for the loss of her mind is the dead: dead ancestors who take over her mind and attempt to write a history of their city, Uzhhorod, which they were taken from by the Third Reich and placed in Auschwitz. The narrator muses about whether her mind-loss may be some kind of inter-generational trauma.
 
She makes an important point when she explains later in the book, “we must have a world where no one, no matter how sick they are, is made to disappear.” The narrator tells her story and it feels relatable and real. She is seen by me and I suspect by many others. I know many beloveds with undiagnosable illnesses, and I watch while they are made to deal with a lot of patronizing and fruitless ignorance and lip service and it infuriates me. The narrator’s eventual ability to take control of her health and to address the issues with the counsellor’s inappropriate behaviour was a satisfying outcome.
 
Stylistically, I was reminded of one of my favourite reads in the last decade or so, Eimear McBride’s A Girl Is A Half-Formed Thing (Gallery Beggar Press, 2013), another work that experiments with voice and the telling of a story. There was poetry in that too, a kind of rapidity of quick, short sentences. Here what I like is Schreiber’s ability to vary tone by means of sentences that alternate between the languorous and the energetic.
 
The work is vivid and imaginative but also so authentic and believable. The narrator talks about the family name Schreiber towards the end of the book and mentions it means writer. I always separate the speaker of a work from its author, but if this work were labelled creative nonfiction, I would not be surprised.
 
I want to dwell on the beauty of the work, share with you some of the text that made me feel awe. 

The year I turned twelve, men came—in shadowy clothes faded in memory—to deliver me into my sickness.
On Middle School (I am twelve-fourteen)

​I love the way the sickness is represented, the use of shadowy clothes and faded memory, which is part of this unknown condition. The narrator explains that in a way she is seen as wicked because she can do nothing and idleness goes against a strong work ethic, presenting the ableist doctrine matter-of-factly, somehow making it seem even more damning.
 
On the other hand, the relationship with the counsellor is “a pure force” and daylight: 

Daylight as substance. Daylight as what everything craves.
On Cheating on an Ex (I am eighteen)
 
There was trash on the beach. The lake spit up driftwood and egg cartons, as if to say, This is the rot of it; this is the proof. Other things have happened.
On What the Sea Gave (I am eighteen)

​I love the tension that is created in this scene. The counsellor and the narrator are inappropriately together, not in her office, on the beach. They spend time in the counsellor’s apartment too, and in a café:

Thinking the way I loved you was the way to love everything, I was careful, so careful, with lovers. I thought love was a stage play, carefully crafted. I thought it was so delicate that a careless moment, an open door, could vanish it like a young woman’s mind.
On Echoes

​Back to Schreiber’s ability to create spring-wired sentences that are ready to pop out of their tight container at any point, like a jack-in-the-box, with a surprise at the end. In this case, the connection to the loss of the narrator’s mind:

Your mother said we were going to hell. I didn’t believe her but in this time I dreamt about it. There were rivers in hell. It had a geography and nothing was in proportion. Strange forces withstood destruction and waited. Some nights hell was flat, and other nights it was a spiral, bending deeper under the world so the greatest evildoers can be held in the most remote location. When I first saw you sin, when I first saw you envy me, I started to love you.
 
During this time I got the feeling that some people like us have, a terrible feeling that should take a life to attain: I felt a little damned. Too many people believed it to be resisted completely.
On Punishment

​This book is also about queerness and homophobia. Hell is a thread throughout and it also appears in the second part of the book:

One afternoon I found an online tourist brochure that showed all the things there were to do in Uzhhorod, a city once in Czechoslovakia but now in Ukraine. There was a Jewish graveyard in the mountains just west of the city the pamphlet named ‘abandoned.’ The site contained the graves of the Jews of Uzhhorod up until 1944, after which there was no one left to die. Linked to nature still, in the image in the pamphlet lilies had swallowed up some of the cemetery.
 
Tombstones peered out of the soil, like breaths pressing into the wind. The earth sighed.
On Touring Eastern Europe (I am twenty-one)

​An example of the balance of force and delicacy here:

The dead adore my mind. Wishing to keep it for longer and gather up more of it, they burn oils, set up a conflagration while they sit in the palm of the world. Freed to roam in the daylight, the dead family become water and air. They cling to ship masts and oil rigs. They are not the gods of the sea. They are the sea.
Their Fourth Year of Living

​I have many more dogears and little stars in the margins, but I want to say that this book affected me. It surpassed any sense of plot I needed to reach into my pores and my bones. I experienced a kind of knowing that felt familiar, but floating as a shadow of memory, as if I were the narrator or had been the narrator. Perhaps others will feel this too. I admire Schreiber’s ability to create a work that is so compelling it made its way through my muddled brain in the throes of sickness, and for her point that no one, no matter how sick they are, should be made to disappear. The narrator does not disappear in this story. She is seen. And she is not alone. 

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Photo credit: Jim Johnstone

Amanda Earl (she/her) reads and reviews on the unceded territory of the Algonquin Anishinaabeg Peoples. Earl is a resident reviewer for The Temz Review. Her most recent work is Slutflowers, a collaborative poetry chapbook with Matthew Walsh (Knife|Fork|Book, 2026). Earl is managing editor of Bywords.ca and the editor of Judith: Women Making Visual Poetry (Timglaset Editions, 2021). Earl creates so that kindred misfits don’t feel alone. Subscribe to her Substack: Amanda Thru the Looking Glass here. Earl loves e-mails that are not AI or spam: [email protected].