The unnamed narrator of Miranda Schreiber’s Iris and the Dead has been despondent since she was twelve. At eighteen, she seeks out counselling to aid her in her efforts to come out as a lesbian, only to have her therapist, Iris, abuse her power and initiate an inappropriate romantic relationship. An epic of Grecian proportions, the novel follows the narrator’s perilous passage through the relationship and its aftermath. Her plight is intertwined with a magical realist folk tale that sees her ancestors return from the dead to speak about fascism, intergenerational trauma and the power of storytelling. Iris and the Dead renders love, sickness, tragedy and the sublime lyrically and incisively, equal parts beautiful and haunting. 

Schreiber is a Toronto-based writer and researcher. As a journalist, she focuses on healthcare and public health, with work published on the legalization of medical assistance in dying in Canada, the gendered nature of care and the TikTokification of medicine. Following the launch of Schreiber’s Bookhug-published debut novel Iris and the Dead in June of this year, Nicky Taylor spoke with the author about the relationship between journalism and fiction and what it means to reclaim your imagination. 

The following interview has been edited for concision and clarity. 

Nicky Taylor: At the book launch, you spoke about yourself and the narrator as distinct entities, but there were also moments where you said “we.” I’m curious how you delineate the relationship between the narrator and yourself, and how that impacts the distinction between fiction and autofiction. 

Miranda Schreiber: It’s my voice. I think of it as me talking and my arguments. I made so many changes in terms of plot, such that every scene is now fictional in some way. It was almost like taking myself and putting myself in a bunch of fictional scenarios. I intentionally left the narrator unnamed. In the folk tale part, I wanted to bring in that the dead family was related to me as the author. But I would still consider it a novel in a lot of ways because as much as it is my voice, and I would probably stand behind most of the claims I made in the first person, a lot of the things in it were fictional. 

NT: You’re a journalist in addition to your creative writing. I have found it tricky to move between those modes in my own work, because in journalism there’s such an allegiance to fact. Was it difficult to surrender some of the facts to this more fictional realm?

MS: It was very fun and easy. I kept forgetting that I could just make up whatever I wanted. So anytime a conviction or a memory didn’t really suit the story or serve it in some way, I could just depart and really lean into the storytelling aspect. Especially as I started weaving in the magical realist elements, I got to forget about rhetoric and evidence-based storytelling, which was very joyous, I would say.

NT: That experience with the writing process feels very apt to the novel, given that throughout so much of it, the narrator is trying to reclaim her imagination. 

MS: Yeah. In a way, the folk tale is the final act of the book. It demonstrates the possibility of storytelling, and hopefully there’s a clarity coming through in this exercise in imagination and imaginative faculties. [In the end, the narrator] is trying to show Iris,“look what I can do now,” and, “I would never need you from this place of power”—this kind of developed, completed state. I didn’t really intend it as a coming of age story, but that is what ended up happening.I think the folk tale she starts inventing in the middle of the book, and even the existence of the book itself, are celebrations of having made it to that perspective [of being in a place of power], and that was really lovely. 

NT: In one of Iris’s many abuses of power, she gets the narrator to start sharing the contents of her diary with her, which leads to the diary becoming a site where she tries to win Iris’s admiration and affection. The novel itself is written diaristically, and is largely addressed to Iris. Toward the end that’s no longer the case. There’s such an interesting paradox in this reclamation of imagination and storytelling: the narrator no longer needs Iris, but so much of that relationship was predicated on stories. It’s a beautiful unraveling of this bondage, when the narrator reclaims the power of story.

MS: It’s the act of reclaiming that capacity that destroys the tie between her and Iris, because she can write now, so she doesn’t really need Iris anymore. That was a surprise that emerged more naturally from the project of writing the book: I thought of it as ending in almost like a marriage between her and the ability to write. She realizes that the love story between her and Iris was always going to be secondary to the need to communicate. 

I was thinking a lot about muses throughout. Iris is obviously the muse, but she’s not enough. Once the narrator feels like she’s back in that seat of being able to express divine inspiration and has this feeling that the gods have returned to her, Iris as a muse isn’t important in the same way.

NT: You spoke at the launch about how you’d been reading stories or interacting with media that follow a narrative arc where horrible things happen, and then some beautiful things happen, which are meant to almost reconcile the narrative as if to say, “it’s all evened out.”  I kept thinking about this Goethe quote that has been haunting me. “Everything tragic is based upon an irreconcilable opposition. As soon as a reconciliation sets in or becomes possible, the tragic disappears.”You seem to resist reconciliation in the novel when you write, “I realized I could not make things magnificent. I realized I would live with things as they were.” 

MS: Yeah, that was a real feeling I had once I was getting to the end of writing. You have this feeling that if the story can be told, then it will have not only existed, but it will have made amends. I think that politically leaves us at a bit of a moot point. If we have to confront that things lost can’t always be restored, I think we would be a lot less willing to allow anything to be lost in the first place.

When I made that comment about those works I had been frustrated with, I was thinking about movies that came out in the mid-2010s like Blue is the Warmest Colour or Call Me By Your Name, where the younger party is literally underage but there is never really an explicit reckoning with whether something abusive or harmful has happened.

NT: There’s this idea that as writers, the act of writing is what makes traumas worthwhile. I think that you do something really interesting with the novel where it’s really evident that something beautiful and worthwhile has emerged from these experiences, but you refrain from surrendering how harmful and ugly those forms of abuse were. In the last lines of the book, you write, “There have been other ruptures I need to discuss. Although even these, in some way, were set into motion by the autumn I spent with Iris when I was eighteen.” To me, it’s almost a way of subverting that narrative about trauma and writing. The narrator is pointing to the horrible things and asking us to look at them with her.

MS: Totally. I was thinking a lot about writing that looks at abusive relationships, but points out the positive experiences inherent in really intense relationships. It [suggests that] because these positives exist, it’s too complicated to say with any conviction, “this shouldn’t have happened.” I wanted to make space for the good, the bad and the really firm resounding conclusion that it’s just not worth it.

There’s a manic joy that I tried to have as a current throughout, and that is obviously resuscitated in the moments with Iris. It was really important to me to honour the beauty of a relationship that breaks your brain and introduces this rupture in her psyche. And it was important to document it in a way that was addressed to the other party, because I thought that that was a way of accounting for the joy, but also tying it in in a way that insisted on the recognition of harm done. 

NT: One of the things this book does so well is holding so many worlds. It produces this kind of gestalt—this greater-than-the-sum-of-its-parts effect where you weave everything together and nothing is lost. Except, of course, that which is lost to the narrator: health, autonomy, her mind. You do very well at articulating how precarious health can be, and you also draw a really interesting relationship between love and sickness. It brought to mind a Georges Bataille quote I read while I was reading your book: “To be this in love is to be sick. And I love to be sick.” 

MS: I felt this way for a really long time, too. There’s a Roland Barthes quote: “Someone tells me: this kind of love is not viable … Why is the viable a good thing? Why is it better to last than to burn?” There is a question of needing to acknowledge the intense vitality of the moment when Iris and the narrator connect, because they’re both in such a state of deprivation and banishment. 

NT: Right. The narrator has lost her mind and feels alienated in her community, while Iris is alone in a new city, and they’re also the only queer people they know. I want to ask more directly a question you’ve touched on already: do you think that love and abuse can coexist?

MS: What I was trying to do was tell a love story and then make an argument that the relationship was abusive. The fact of the asymmetry is what makes it abusive. I wanted to argue that what love ought to be is lateral, a coming together of two equals, and that when it happens in an imbalanced way, the freedom of one party is going to be compromised. 

NT: To me, your novel has a lot of parallels with Pure Colour by Sheila Heti. There’s some great magical realist stuff happening in that book, too, and experimentation in narration. Both books are very Toronto, and you both write about lakes. 

MS: The lake and water are supposed to be a recurrent fixation for Iris and the narrator because the main thing I think they’re trying to do is destroy the social world. The social world hates them being together, but not for the right reasons. Not because people see that this is a very vulnerable person who might be damaged by the experience, but more just because it doesn’t sit well with them. 

They two are surveilled by Iris’s colleagues, by the narrator’s friends and family. They’re watched on the bus, they’re watched at the coffee shop. They have the feeling that they’re committing a crime. They’re a little bit on the run. By going to the water again and again, the point was just to reduce all of the social variables present and get into a state where there’s just this unified substance. It’s just them, the water, the beach and the occasional person walking by. That’s the state at which they can communicate the clearest, mind-to-mind, consciousness-to-consciousness. Also, the book is about the sublime. So nature had to be there a lot. 

NT: It’s funny to me to hear you say that it’s about the sublime because to me it’s really about the tragic. Maybe it’s the relationship between the two—we can never really realize the sublime, and there is some tragic element in that. What you were just saying about upsetting the social world felt very Grecian to me. This feels like a good segue into the book’s references to muses and gods. 

MS: I was definitely thinking about classic Greek and Roman texts like Odyssey, Aeneid, Iliad and even some Homeric hymns. That came from an anxiety about not being too derivative or getting lost in modern fiction and getting stuck in that paradigm and then missing truths. I also read a lot of ancient Greek science. I was looking at different alternative cosmologies. I looked at biblical texts, narratives around the second coming. That came from a need, maybe neurotic in some ways, to look to any possible alternative perspective. This wide-ranging inquiry mirrors that of the protagonist. She no longer believes that there’s an inherent morality that she can count on, but she believes that there’s more than just the initial paradigm she was introduced to—these ideas of “work as hard as you can and things will work out for you” and “go to the doctor if you're sick.” That’s been obliterated. So she’s looking for more. 

NT: How do you see the relationship between this book and your journalistic work on medical assistance in dying? To me, both works seem to emerge from an ethos of “no one gets left behind.”

MS: Something I was thinking about a lot throughout was this thing my grandpa used to say: “I breathe, I hope.” If there’s breath, there’s hope. I liked that as an anti-fascist principle because it endows any living, breathing thing with rights. There’s a moment when the narrator is talking to this guy in a bar and he’s going on about how reading is fundamental to who he is. She’s making the point that actually, your abilities can be taken away, your desires or preferences can be taken away, your ability to hear and see even, and there’s still someone there. There’s still a soul that can suffer. That’s the sort of baseline: an entity that requires protection. ⁂

Nicky Taylor is a poet, journalist and student based in Tiohtià:ke/Montreal. They were named Student Journalist of the Year by Canadian University Press in 2022 and shortlisted for the 2025 Ralph Gustafson Poetry Prize.