Free Therapy by Rebecca Ivory review – delicious reveals and rug pulls in stories of aimless women | Short stories

The latest Sally Rooney-endorsed Irish writer makes a book-length debut with a short story collection that captures the experience of being a young woman today with a clear eye and a listless sigh. Crap jobs and a desire not to go to them, crap men and the desire still to go to them, and worse-than-crap housing are common themes in these airless stories of aimless women.

The title isn’t just cute: it’s no surprise when Rebecca Ivory thanks her therapists in her acknowledgment. She is excellent at revealing how our understanding of ourselves, and others, is a layered and silently shifting thing; she peels back what is said to expose the tender and embarrassing desires and delusions beneath. Her characters are frequently self-aware yet stuck – trapped in agonised inaction. They’re defeated by the most basic tasks; one fails to replace a lightbulb, another a broken bike light, as if preferring to simply stay in the dark.

Well-observed though these stories are – Ivory particularly excels at charting each awkward beat of a bad sexual encounter – the tales of insecure, lonely gen Zers can be the least satisfying. As character studies they might have gathered weight if extended to novel length, but don’t always deliver the crystalline quality of a great short story. Those that depart from the prevailing twentysomething malaise often feel more memorable.

Push and Pull makes for an arresting case in point: a look back at teenage friendship soured by competitive weight loss that sharply pins down power struggles among adolescent girls. In The Slip, a dead cat and an SUV combine to test a middle-aged man’s patience. In Settling Down, a woman becomes obsessed with a damp specialist who looks at her mould-riddled flat after the landlord blames her and her boyfriend for causing condensation (“how inconsiderate of you… breathing in your own home”). Ivory performs many small, delicious reveals and rug-pulls in this study of modern relationships and the rental market – a fine display of her talents.

The latest Sally Rooney-endorsed Irish writer makes a book-length debut with a short story collection that captures the experience of being a young woman today with a clear eye and a listless sigh. Crap jobs and a desire not to go to them, crap men and the desire still to go to them, and worse-than-crap housing are common themes in these airless stories of aimless women.

The title isn’t just cute: it’s no surprise when Rebecca Ivory thanks her therapists in her acknowledgment. She is excellent at revealing how our understanding of ourselves, and others, is a layered and silently shifting thing; she peels back what is said to expose the tender and embarrassing desires and delusions beneath. Her characters are frequently self-aware yet stuck – trapped in agonised inaction. They’re defeated by the most basic tasks; one fails to replace a lightbulb, another a broken bike light, as if preferring to simply stay in the dark.

Well-observed though these stories are – Ivory particularly excels at charting each awkward beat of a bad sexual encounter – the tales of insecure, lonely gen Zers can be the least satisfying. As character studies they might have gathered weight if extended to novel length, but don’t always deliver the crystalline quality of a great short story. Those that depart from the prevailing twentysomething malaise often feel more memorable.

Push and Pull makes for an arresting case in point: a look back at teenage friendship soured by competitive weight loss that sharply pins down power struggles among adolescent girls. In The Slip, a dead cat and an SUV combine to test a middle-aged man’s patience. In Settling Down, a woman becomes obsessed with a damp specialist who looks at her mould-riddled flat after the landlord blames her and her boyfriend for causing condensation (“how inconsiderate of you… breathing in your own home”). Ivory performs many small, delicious reveals and rug-pulls in this study of modern relationships and the rental market – a fine display of her talents.