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"  It&amp;#039;s hard to miss the surface parallels between Sex and the City and Iris Has Free Time (Soft Skull), Iris Smyles&amp;#039; debut novel about an aspiring writer navigating life and love in the Big Apple. There&amp;#039;s love interest Lex, an aging party boy whose commitment issues resemble those of Mr. Big more than a little, not to mention the narrator&amp;#039;s punny turns of phrase\u2014such as calling her alcohol-induced blackouts &amp;quot;pink-outs.&amp;quot; At one point, she even writes a sex column for an online magazine. But it would be a mistake to dismiss Iris as a Candace Bushnell knockoff: Iris is roughly a decade younger than Carrie Bradshaw (the narrative runs from Iris&amp;#039; NYU commencement to her thirtieth birthday), and the novel&amp;#039;s deeper themes dovetail far more with\u2014to stick to HBO references here\u2014Girls. The book has allusions to Friendster and the dot-com bubble that might seem downright archaic to Lena Dunham and her cohort, but the crux of the story\u2014traversing the long, winding road toward adulthood\u2014is one most millennials can relate to. (The title is a reference to Iris&amp;#039; chronic underemployment.) What&amp;#039;s more, it seems that unlike Carrie, Iris isn&amp;#039;t about to sign herself up for an extra decade of Peter-Pandom. As she asks after surviving a series of benders, &amp;quot;When did all these games stop being fun?&amp;quot; Liked this story? Get it first when you subscribe to ELLE magazine. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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