“The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read. Not by any other person, and not even by yourself at some later date. Otherwise you begin excusing yourself. You must see the writing as emerging like a long scroll of ink from the index finger of your right hand; you must see your left hand erasing it.”
Iris approaches her memoir as if it is a private journal. For her own use, she records the events of her life. She confesses things that she has never told a living soul. In the end, however, she doesn't have the strength to follow her own advice and publish her book. She leaves that to her granddaughter after her own death.
“When you're young, you think everything you do is disposable. You move from now to now, crumpling time up in your hands, tossing it away. You're your own speeding car. You think you can get rid of things, and people too—leave them behind. You don't yet know about the habit they have, of coming back."
Writing her autobiography as an old woman, Iris is forced to reexamine her indiscriminate youth. She's been harboring a lot of regrets over the years because she didn't recognize the consequences of her choices when she was younger. She tried to forgot many things, but now they're haunting her. In fact she decided to write this book in order to give her conscience some sort of relief from grief over long-ago deeds.
“Happiness is a garden walled with glass: there's no way in or out. In Paradise there are no stories, because there are no journeys. It's loss and regret and misery and yearning that drive the story forward, along its twisted road.”
Iris is content to look back upon her life and realize that she lived it. She really experienced so much which she wouldn't undo, even the bad things. Now that she's old, she has her memory to keep her company with endless stories of what she's experienced. She recognizes that she is a broken person, but the journey of life is worth it after all.
“What is it the I'll want from you? Not love: that would be too much to ask. Not forgiveness, which isn't yours to bestow. Only a listener, perhaps; only someone who will see me. Don't prettify me though, whatever else you do: I have no wish to be a decorated skull.
"But I leave myself in your hands. What choice do I have? By the time you read this last page, that- if anywhere- is the only place I will be.”
As Iris writes, she knows that she's dying. This is her final act in this life, so she begins to question why she did it in the first place. She learns that, like all people, all she ever really wanted was to be known and understood. In writing all the garish ugly truths of her life, she doesn't expect the people who knew her in those days to forgive her. She just wants them to know who she truly was all those years, to have every deed exposed. She wants her memory to be complete because, after all, she will only be a memory that survives in the minds of those who knew her in life.
“When you're unhinged, things make their way out of you that should be kept inside, and other things get in that ought to be shut out. The locks lose their powers. The guards go to sleep. The passwords fail.”
Iris loses her need to protect herself now that she's on her deathbed. The things that seemed to matter don't matter so much now. She's less interested in reputation and preservation than sincerity.
