My mother once told me, 'Don’t smoke cigarettes; it doesn’t look pretty when it rots your teeth.'

Thank goodness her teeth looked nice for the mug shots.

Far too many children can say they know the depths of growing up with an alcoholic mother, Iris Hawthorne is one of them. A youth filled with turbulence and tragedies in upstate New York, Iris strives most to become anything unlike her mother, Vera.

She takes her first opportunity to get away for college and heads south to New Orleans. Iris tries to start a new life, attempting to suppress her old fears and anxieties. However, without truly getting help, she finds herself shifting into a vicious cycle, not so different than her mother’s. The more successful she becomes the further her bar lowers. The land of denial paved in top shelf liquors, fancy wines, and champagnes.

Iris slips into a downward spiral, mirroring Vera’s, until the day they come together for a paramount of unimaginable events. Iris is forced to look inward and deal with the person who has antagonized her the whole time, the side she hides from the world, herself.

At last, after many years apart, the past will become present as Iris comes face to face with her mother, Vera, like a ghost made flesh. As if Iris’s skeletons could stand from the closet and walk out. She can’t imagine things getting any worse, but then again, she’s said that before.