Prepare for humiliation, via a series of vivid short stories

Free Therapy is Rebecca Ivory's debut short-story collection
Free Therapy is Rebecca Ivory's debut short-story collection - Jonathan Cape

In her debut short-story collection, Rebecca Ivory has taken all the tiny humiliations of life and made something so precise, so articulate, that it sometimes feels mortifying to read.

Ivory was a recipient of the Literature Bursary from the Arts Council of Ireland, a generous stipend that allows writers some financial security. It has, in part, been credited with enabling the country’s recent plenitude of good writing. For Free Therapy, a collection so concerned with precarity, those conditions seem especially relevant: Ivory’s stories, set largely in Ireland, are often explicitly about material conditions. In ‘Settling Down’, a couple’s flat is assailed by rising damp and a prying workman. In others, precarity manifests through uncertain and untrustworthy relationships, which are almost always heightened by financial insecurity.

These are also stories concerned with the gap between how we interpret another person’s thoughts, and the potential for misinterpretation. ‘Lines to Keep’ is a fine example: a father and daughter, desperate for connection, fall into bouts of self-reflection so deep that the pair are paralysed. This might sound moralising, or sentimental, but it isn’t, because Ivory’s prose is spare and sensible. Instead, the story feels like a plain investigation into our most solitary thoughts.

But that clinical tone allows a certain levity, too. There’s something unburdened in the way Ivory describes, in the eponymous story, an irritating if well-meaning “women’s group”, the successful members of whom become “midwifery students who wear tea tree as perfume”. (Her characters are desperate to flourish.)

In the most successful story in the collection, ‘The Slip’, Ivory describes a humiliation so awful my reaction was bodily. An older character, reeling from a litany of light rejections, slams his hand against a 4x4 in his office car-park: an act that’s both mundane and confrontational. Instead of capitulating, he commits to his moment of frustration, rebuts his colleagues’ attempts at de-escalation, and jettisons their potential good grace. It’s a thought experiment: what if you allowed yourself to give in, briefly, to a disastrous impulse?

That this is a short-story collection feels apt. We strain to find a relationship between each text, looking for links or common characteristics to make a whole. But there’s nothing jarring about the movement between these stories: no new worlds, just something disconsolate about each of the ones we have. Ivory’s people are in need of therapy, and in need of it to be free.


Free Therapy by Rebecca Ivory is published by Jonathan Cape at £16.99. To order your copy, call 0844 871 1514 or visit Telegraph Books