Personal and family history are woven together to depict the emotional vulnerability and trauma that resulted from a therapist’s abuse of power. In the underworld, offerings made to a mute god allow the dead to experience life once more.
What will become of our narrator without her mind?
Iris and the Dead is intimate to the point of invasive.
Divided into three parts, the narrator’s story unfolds with the deep, exclusive insight gained when writing in a journal. At seventeen, she seeks out a therapist for guidance regarding queer sexuality, internal conflict, and coming out. But there’s a deeper, more concerning issue, that also motivates this need for counselling.
When I was twelve, I lost my mind.
The storyteller developed atypical depression at a young age, and describes issues with memory, imagination, and reduction of sensory awareness. This dampening of capability made educational and interpersonal pursuits difficult. She knows something is wrong, that things used to be easier or more natural, but conversations with family, friends, and physicians are fruitless.
Iris, filling a temporary counselling position, begins sessions with the narrator, and all too quickly the line between advisor and offender blurs.
We spoke on a bus. We had met at the coffee shop late that day and talked for nearly four hours. When we got to your stop, you said, Let’s keep talking.
“Sessions” start normally, but speed into late night hours spent in a cafe, on the bus, texting or talking on the phone, and even staying overnight at Iris’s apartment. Rather than offering guidance and support, Iris is nearly co-dependent in these interactions, and far from professional. Iris urges the storyteller to come out, as though this will resolve her concerns with queer identify. Therapeutic journalling takes on a perverse and performative aspect when Iris expectantly holds out her hand to receive the notebook.
When Iris ultimately leaves their communication continues, albeit briefly. The narrator is still without professional mental health support and experiencing atypical depression symptoms, but is also faced with having to explain her relationship with Iris. Friends, family, and other students, ask why their sessions went so long. Some people even speculate that the two of them must have been in love, but our narrator isn’t so certain.
I wanted to close the jaws of the sky, which yawned like they were going to let in the dead. I felt so afraid you might have started to suspect—as I did—that something was very wrong with me. My feelings for you, my dependency on you, petrified me. But there was nothing to do, tenderness for you ran through me at every moment. The depression had taken everything from me at that point, besides the violent capacity I had to love you.
Her depression deepens, a healing journey begins, and beneath the brain fog, intergenerational trauma makes itself known. Great-grandmother Regina makes an offering to Mater Larum, and is given the storyteller’s mind. With it, she and her dead family are able to live again. They travel and experience the physical sensations that our narrator has grown numb to. Unsure how long they’ll have access to this mind and its gifts, they task themselves with a mission: they write a book.
On the difference between love and obsession
Iris and the Dead has similar vibes as the films Saltburn and Lurker—minus the mutual manipulation.
There is an abuse of power dynamic, and some psychological manipulation in Schreiber’s debut novel, but not on the part of the narrator. She mentions writing entries that she thinks Iris will find appealing, and does black out a section that confesses her love, but I feel these are acts of self-protection, and Iris—being a therapist—should have been aware of that.
The storyteller isn’t the only victim here, and Iris isn’t the only abuser. There are other students whose sessions start later or are outright cancelled due to the time spent with the main character. Neglect is also present in the novel’s background scenery. Instructors and doctors are not as attentive as they should be, and the people who witness Iris’s inappropriate behaviour do little, if anything, to stop it.
When people in positions of trust and authority (parents, police, doctors, teachers, mentors, babysitters, etc.) fail to conduct themselves properly, a victims’ worldly perceptions are altered.
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.
The characters don’t talk about their feelings with one another, yet they speak constantly, and to observers they seem wholly immersed in a relationship. There is a ten year age difference between the two women, and the main character is a minor when they meet. At times, Iris behaves more like the patient in their dynamic. She shares information about her past relationships, her struggles with guilt over cheating, and frustrating conversations with her mother.
The second half of the novel covers the time period after Iris has moved away and how the narrator continues to struggle with mental health.
Imagine having Iris as your first therapist. Would you ever seek help again?
On reality versus fiction
The relationship dynamic with Iris is uncomfortable to read. I’ve been to therapy, I journal, I have struggled with depression and anxiety, and I’m queer. It was very easy to put myself in the narrator’s shoes. Made moreso because I have also experienced issues trying to obtain support from educators and medical professionals.
The doctors didn’t know what to do and neither did the professors. They didn’t want to look at it. They wanted me to disappear. They only wanted to look at the students who could understand the short stories. I had been, in their eyes, somehow terminated.
Unfortunately, Iris is to be expected. Broken systems beget broken people, who in turn, break more people.
Schreiber’s novel is an echo of so many stories I’ve heard from women and uterus owners during the last year while I counted down the days to my hysterectomy. Individuals that are told by doctors, nurses, therapists, psychiatrists, EAP program administrators, co-workers, friends, and family that their pain, their mental health, or what-have-you is “not a big deal.”
In a 2025 survey by Maple, women reported issues accessing care in a system that they feel was not designed for them. In my own search for answers regarding life-long abdominal pain, I’ve been called a drug addict, referred to counselling, and had tests that found nothing physically wrong. Yet during my surgery, stage four endometriosis was discovered and my estimated recovery time doubled.
On inherited illness, magically reimagined
As the dead family immerse themselves in the land of the living. I recede into death’s dimensions. Each skill lost to me is a skill gained by the dead. I forget; they remember. I trip; they regain the capacity for motion. I am gradually exiled; they return. I no longer need sweaters in October; goosebumps raise on their arms.
I didn’t know anything about Mater Larum until I read Iris and the Dead. She’s a minor deity whose tongue is cut out before she’s banished to the underworld in Roman mythology. Her counterpart in Greek mythology is called Mania, the goddess of insanity and madness.
Great-grandmother Regina and her family using the storyteller’s brain to experience being alive again is such a beautiful and touching way to talk about intergenerational trauma.
Even in a healthy and nurturing environment, trauma can be passed down to children. As a child, I remember being told by an Elder that “what we do today affects the next seven generations.”
The dead family make reference to concentration camps, poverty, and war. They travel to Toronto to watch over their descendants, including the narrator. It takes them time to understand how to use a 12-year-old mind. At first, they write impulsively: “We were not destroyed, we were purposefully transformed.” They come to understand that their family is doing well, albeit in a time and age that they don’t fully understand, and they set about writing a book for the living that’s about the dead called The Commencement of Time, which includes one of my favourite quotes:
the beginning of consciousness were very dangerous. Life had never been so fragile as it became once there was emotion. It was the mass sacrifice of silence, the kind known prior to sensation.
On recommendations
Iris and the Dead is a triggering cautionary tale and a beautiful examination of generational resilience.
It’s vulnerable and aggressively protective. Iris is both recounted and addressed directly. It reminds me of the discomfort felt when witnessing an argument.
People who like journalling or struggle with it will enjoy reading this. Patients who have endured long wait times to get medical issues investigated, or utilized mental health services / support / medications, will find this novel relatable. Anyone in a position of trust will benefit from reading this story (as a guideline how not to behave toward their dependents). Iris and the Dead will resonate with Survivors of trauma, and descendants of intergenerational trauma.
Reading this made me feel connected and understood.
Every mind is a world. When one is lost, sadly a world dies with it.
