Two things about Iris Smyles that you need to know upfront.
One — if you “Amazon” her (think “Google”), and look under “Similar Authors,” you get nothing.
Zip. Bupkus. Donuts. So that should give you some idea of what a rare bird (possibly extinct, as you will see below) we’re dealing with here.
Two — Iris Smyles is the kind of writer who makes writers want to write.
Whether it’s her first novel, “Iris Has Free Time,” a sort of humorous quasi-bio with veins of poignant truth running through it (or is it the other way around?), or “Dating Tips for the Unemployed,” her second book, or any of her various essays published in all the best places (The New Yorker, Paris Review, blah blah blah), or the latest, “Droll Tales,” a series of intertwined essays due out in June, when you read Iris’s words — if you’re a writer — you want to drop everything and WRITE.
And when presented with the opportunity to interview this 2017 Thurber Prize for American Humor finalist, this Pied Piper of writers, the questions can’t be banal or platitudinous. No stroking and coaxing for Iris, no “where do you get your ideas?” or “how much is based on your real life?” nor would she want it that way. But even when batting absurdist curveball questions, Smyles’s pathos always shines through.
If you were an animal, what would you be and why?
The long-extinct, once-thought-mythical Dodo bird who, over many generations, forgot how to fly. At night I’d dream of soaring over land and sea, and by day, I’d tell the others, fruitlessly, of my idea. I’d sit by the shore alone and wonder, am I crazy to keep flapping?
What’s your death-row dinner?
I’d skip the dinner in order that I could refuse my captors. I’d refuse, and this way wrest control over the conditions of my last breath, asserting my humanity through my unreason, refusing food when I’m hungry, rather than submitting to being fed as would an animal. I’d choose to die hungry, full of appetite and life.
Otherwise waffles.
Your third book, “Droll Tales,” comes out next month. It’s been said that writing a book is like having a child. I have three children, and I don’t really like my third one all that much. How do you feel about your different books?
My first novel, “Iris Has Free Time,” is perhaps my most complex. The narrator’s voice is quite naïve which belies the maturity of subject matter — time, youth, the meaning of experience, identity, self-deception. The book progresses through an evolution of voice and perspective rather than through plot, which confuses many readers who expect something more common. I’m afraid the book is often misunderstood. Further, that the novel has a young female narrator makes it easy to dismiss. When a man, Philip Roth say, writes about love and sex, critics are apt to say he is sounding the depths of our common humanity, but when a woman ventures into the same territory they’ll more likely call it “journaling” and slap a pink cover on it. I am very proud of that book and it means the world to me when, now and then, someone writes to me to say it reached them.
My second book, “Dating Tips for the Unemployed,” is written in short digestible essay-like stories, with intervening fake ads promising to fix your life with various invented products that can be purchased through the mail. Critics faun over Hemingway’s six-word novel: “For sale: Baby shoes. Never worn.” But I think I’ve done him one better: “Unlicensed chiropractor will cure your anxiety.” Of course, the trouble with calling a book “Dating Tips for the Unemployed,” is it dooms you forever to have to explain, “No, it’s not self help. The title is facetious.” After that people usually say, “I understand. So what are the tips?”
My third book, “Droll Tales,” is about love and other sorrows. The stories, on the surface very different, are all about loss. Loss of love, work, illusions, self, hope. That this book was born out of deep sadness, I think, accounts for its humor. I recently went through a rather severe depression. This thing, and then these things, happened — I was demolished. What’s the point of all of this pain, I wondered? Why go on? Is life, at its best, just a series of colds and then you die?
Depression is very different from sadness, I learned, and it terrified me. It’s like when a Looney Tunes character runs over a cliff, looks down, and only then, seeing there is no ground beneath him, begins to fall. That’s the descent — when you realize that everything you thought about life, everything that held you in place, doesn’t exist. A chasm opens beneath you and you see, with horror, that it’s always been there. You’ve been standing on air. When you come out of it, if you do, you’re never the same. There is underneath everything the fear that the ground might open up again. Recovery is learning to live with that fear.
After that description you might think it odd that I should call these tales droll. But have you ever found that when things can’t seem to get any worse, there is sometimes this moment when, strangely, you begin to laugh? It’s a rueful laugh, sure, but suddenly it’s all deeply funny. You read “Oedipus Rex” and discover it’s a comedy. And “The Book of Job” an absurdist romp. The stories in “Droll Tales” emphasize what Camus would call absurdity. In “Droll Tales,” despair is often where life begins. There — lost, grieving, and hopeless — is where we can be reborn.
While my previous books played a lot with autobiography, “Droll Tales,” which is much more fantastical, feels the most personal. I can only describe it this way: There is a recurring dream I had as a kid, where I’d try to go home and would come to my street, only it wasn’t my street. It looked like my street, the house looked like my house, and all the trees looked like our trees, but it was foreign. This book is kind of the mirror of that uncanny feeling. In “Droll Tales,” nothing is recognizable, yet all of it is familiar. The characters voyage to strange places and discover there the heart’s true home. Sometimes you need to break through all the stuff you think you know in order to find what’s really there.
You’ve said before that you always wanted to be a writer. Now that you are a writer, is there something else you’d rather be doing?
I often fantasize about accounting. When an accountant finishes a tax return, does he lay awake asking himself: But is it good? I like numbers and love that in math there is a provably right answer.
During the lockdown I found myself considering lots of potential life changes. I Googled becoming a carpenter’s apprentice but, finding there is a high incidence of limb loss, was scared away. I looked into shoveling elephant dung in Africa, but everyone wants to do that and most of those jobs require the worker to pay for the privilege. If I had it to do over again, I should have liked to go to Africa to help that woman who is composing an elephant dictionary, or else become an astrophysicist; I’m an avid reader of the latest science. I did look briefly into becoming a swabbie. I liked the idea of long days at sea spent scrubbing the decks, but then reconsidered as the midday sun would wreak havoc on my complexion and since I’m single, am concerned with how I look.
When I get my hair done, I want to do hair, and when I get blood drawn, to be a phlebotomist. I struggle with wanting to do everything, which can bring one dangerously close to doing nothing. So writing is in some ways a good compromise. I can pretend to do a lot more things than I actually have time to do.
Oh, and I’d also like to have a nightclub act like Carmen Miranda, but at an ice cream night club with a fine jazz orchestra and a mirrored dance floor and velvet booths that I would own with a shady business partner named Herb called The DeLuxe. Black tie or you can’t come.
Word is that you divide your time between New York City and Greece, with occasional visits to the East End, among other places. What do you love and not love about each place?
NYC is the best place in the world to be lonely and my main reason for moving there at 18. My favorite hours in Manhattan are spent wandering alone amid the crowds. I also love going to the Metropolitan Opera and the diner, which is to say any diner, though I have my favorite.
The older I get the more I enjoy the East End, especially off-season. The grey skies, the moody beaches, the variety of landscape, the little villages with their little museums and libraries, the community events, and the community itself who have all welcomed me, the galleries, the used bookstores, the fantastic dark making it ideal for the observation of stars.
The small village in Greece where I have spent most summers growing up, I consider my true home. It is not the fancy place you see in postcards, but shabby, tinged with magic, and ours. By “ours” I mean all the family and friends who’ve grown up there with me and who keep going back. We shrug when people tell us about the marvelous islands featured in travel magazines, as if we don’t know about those, as if an infinity pool has anything to do with why we return.
“Droll Tales” vacillates wildly in style and form, from chapter to chapter. Did it all come out together, like a John Coltrane piece? Or was it pieced together over years? And if it was, which was the earliest piece and which was the last?
The earliest story, “Shelves,” was written 20 years ago, but has been revised numerous times since. Many of the stories, similarly, were started a long time ago but have changed so much over the years, that it’s more accurate to describe them as having evolved. Comparing the final version with its earliest incarnation is a bit like comparing a human to man before he walked on land. A reader would not readily recognize them as having anything to do with one another.
I began “O Lost” 17 years ago, but it was the last to be completed. “Medusa’s Garden” is one of the more recent stories in both its conception and execution. In its amorality and ambiguity, it is very different from “Shelves,” which is a kind of modern fairy tale. “Shelves” is optimistic, as if life is a riddle that can be solved, whereas “Medusa’s Garden” grapples with paradox. I could not have written “Medusa’s Garden” six years ago. In order to write it I had to walk into the jaws of life, as Nietzsche would say — I don’t regret that, but I wouldn’t recommend it — and nearly didn’t make it out. In some ways this book feels like a map out of the abyss.
A few years ago, I printed out all of my stories to see what I’d been up to, and from that large collection pulled a few pieces that felt linked in a way I could not yet articulate. Trying to understand the undercurrent of those pieces was the beginning of conceiving this book. From there, with the idea for this book forming in my mind, I got ideas for other stories to accompany them and began writing toward that idea.
People often think there is a chicken/egg kind of thing to writing, like, do you start with an idea and then write it, or just start writing blindly and figure it out as you go? For me, it’s really both. There is a lot of blindness and experimentation, and then a lot of course correcting as I go. I’ll often start with a clear idea but then the work also reveals itself as I write it, and I’ve got to be open to what it’s telling me, and maybe, often, be willing to cross out everything I started with. I guess I’m describing life.
What would you tell your 16-year-old self?
Nothing. Sixteen-year-olds are the most assured people on the planet. They have that marvelous confidence that comes from just a little bit of knowledge and a great heaping of ignorance. Because life has not yet tested them they are a more accurate weathervane than we who’ve been banged around through however many storms. When things get thorny we should all hire a 16-year-old to point the way.
Myself at 22 though, that girl I’d like to talk to. I’d tell her:
Do your best. Don’t worry about failure. The world will answer you how it will, and as long as you are alive there is always another chance. The only real failure is knowing you didn’t try.
Be brave. It is okay and even good that you are afraid. Do not strive for fearlessness, for the world is a dangerous place, and to be fearless is to be stupid. Bravery is not the absence of fear, but courage in the face of it.
There are only wrong answers. The real question is: Which mistake would you like to make?
Visit irissmyles.com to learn more.
