Iris—the narrator and heroine—guides the reader through twenty-four episodes from her life, pausing now and then for meditations on love, sex, work, loneliness, insomnia, arctic exploration, cannibalism, the Higgs boson, Greek mythology, memory, costumes parties, time travel, Rocky I, II, V, IV, VI, and III respectively, literary immortality, real estate trends, and growing up and growing old.

Evoking the screwball heroines of a bygone era as she often finds herself a little lost in her own, Iris ventures blithely into the future, and Smyles collects the flotsam of her past. An encyclopedic, absurd, lyrical, and louche picaresque about that awkward age—between birth and death—when you feel like you don't know at all what you're doing.