In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Miranda Schreiber’s novel Iris and the Dead is an inventive, lyrical, and truly fascinating debut.
Kathryn Mockler wrote of the book:
“Iris and the Dead is an unsettling story of an exploitative relationship, blurred boundaries, intergenerational trauma, a fraught medical system, and the shifting landscape of mental illness and recovery. This moving and meditative queer coming-of-age tale is written in lyrical prose vignettes that embrace desire, menace, and myth. Miranda Schreiber’s debut is as fierce as it is mesmerizing. A gorgeous book that will appeal to readers of Carmen Maria Machado and Daisy Johnson.”
In her own words, here is Miranda Schreiber’s Book Notes music playlist for her debut novel Iris and the Dead:
Iris and the Dead in Eleven Songs
Thinkin Bout You by Frank Ocean
I love this song because it depicts the sublime, first love, and also depicts pretending you don’t care that much. That is kind of the content of the first act of the novel but especially the beginning of the love story. I think this song speaks to the theatrics, paranoia and micro-managing, that accompany the relationship. Maybe they are part of all love stories at the start, but for this one, they were the basis.
Mystery of Love by Sufjan Stevens
I like how dreamy this song is, with references to cosmic loss and gain. I think it keeps the dissociative, oceanic part of being in love that I tried to write about in contact with a sort of incessant internal monologue asking questions of the whole universe. It shows romantic relationships as both sacred and perilous.
The Hours by Beach House
In the book I never went into Iris’ head, although it’s a fixation of the narrator’s. I think this song says something that Iris did convey because it alludes to the contradictory element in a relationship, the tension, that has to break eventually as time changes the context the characters find themselves in. It’s very cautionary. Specifically, “frightened eyes, looking back at me / Change your mind, don’t care about me,” I think relates. The chorus is instructional, but it feels unlikely that the listener is going to go along with not caring because it’s not something that minds choose to do.
A Case of You by Joni Mitchell
I’ve always been attached to “Go to him, stay with him if you can, but be prepared to bleed.” I think the song speaks to total enmeshment, the quality of not loving someone but being usurped so that they become part of consciousness. When the narrator is lost in Iris that’s supposed to be what happens, in that Iris isn’t really experienced as a person because she is too enveloping.
I’d Rather Go Blind by Etta James
I picked this song because it sets up the problem of witnessing your own abandonment, asserting that if the speaker can’t see herself with him it would be better to not see anything. So I think the way the perception of the beloved is the function of sensation, leaving sensing purposeless without them, relates to the part of the book where the narrator experiences a loss of self with heartbreak.
Loud Places by Jamie xx
This song I think captures the bewilderment that is seeded throughout the text, which is part of the recognition of difference in a place that the narrator had identified as continuous with herself. It conveys something about the jarring, disorienting moment when two minds and lives become visibly, tangibly distinct again. I also just like the candidness of the question ‘wasn’t it better with me?’
I Saw an Angel Die by Bobbie Gentry
I think “I Saw An Angel Die” brings out a relevant aspect of the book: witnessing the passing of something that’s supposed to be eternal. Clashing religious frameworks were supposed to be part of the text, how the gods or God really feel about people, and Iris is preoccupied by Christianity. Thinking of the love in the book as angelic I think fits.
This song relates more to the narrator as she is when she begins telling the story. It’s memorializing a completed experience. Bodies of water were supposed to be a big part of the relationship: looking at water together, reducing the number of material variables present so that it’s possible to spontaneously create a new set of social norms. So I really like “in all those lonely nights down by the river” the speaker can’t “keep the night from coming in.”
Then there is also the mystic aspect when she says things like, “help me Cosmia, I’m grieving,” and “wild Cosmia what have you seen?” Throwing up your hands before Fortune I think ties into the folktale in the book, in which a dead family spends time in the living world again.
Both Sides Now by Joni Mitchell
There is a coming-of-age aspect to the book. From the first page the narrator asserts that having seen things from both sides she can bring all the objective evidence forward to Iris to propose that Iris has done harm. I like the idea of enframing Both Sides Now in a confrontational way, so that the narrator is being argumentative, even indicting, with the things she has seen two sides of. I also like interpreting it as a bit of a celebration of survival: of having made it to the second perspective.
Geyser by Mitski
Mitski said this song is about her relationship with music. From this perspective, I think it could connect with the narrator’s relationship with writing and speaking clearly, which is something referred to in the first few pages but is a recurrent fixation. The commitment to craft is so strong that I think it could be taken as a marriage. It isn’t good necessarily, or a higher form of life, but it’s the way it is. I like, “you’re the one I’ve got” as a kind of possessive battle cry. It lends a seriousness to that statement when it’s a reclamation, given the loss the narrator sustains when she can’t write while she is mentally ill.
Turn! Turn! Turn by The Byrds
Maybe this song is appealing to a principle of harmony, saying that it’s good that there is time for both life and death, but I think for the purpose of the playlist it could be read as a more detached analysis about how the cosmos simply is physically apportioned. I tried to reduce the folktale part of the book down to various rituals being enacted and being undone. I liked the idea of the universe including supernatural or magical elements but this not necessarily implying that the universe is morally fair. As in: couldn’t there just be more than we see, and couldn’t this be possible to manipulate?
MIRANDA SCHREIBER is a Toronto-based writer and researcher. Her work has appeared in places like the Toronto Star, the Walrus, the Globe and Mail, BBC, and the National Post. She has been nominated for a digital publishing award by the National Media Foundation and was the recipient of the Solidarity and Pride Champion Award from the Ontario Federation of Labour. Iris and the Dead is her debut book.