Free Therapy by Rebecca Ivory: Another shining new literary talent

Book endorsements are marketing fodder and not to be taken too seriously. Still, most wouldn’t sniff at a stamp of approval from Sally Rooney, as appears on the cover of Rebecca Ivory’s debut short story collection, Free Therapy. . It was Rooney who, as editor of the Stinging Fly, published Ivory’s first short story. A handful of further publications followed, in the Stinging Fly, Banshee, Tangerine, Fallow Media ... It’s a familiar trajectory at this stage.

In Work and Charity, a tension between success and happiness is set up early on. At a party the narrator asks an acquaintance if she would prefer to be happy or successful. Immediately the acquaintance says “successful”. This tension hangs over the story as we follow a young journalist asked to go undercover as a “chugger” . She is supposed to be exposing financial malpractice, but if anything, has more respect for the role of chuggers than for her own role.

In many cases the characters in this collection seem primed to want something, yet lack any meaningful object of desire. In Work and Charity the narrator must convince herself to lust after someone. “I make a conscious decision to like him, to find him attractive.” In Free Therapy, the narrator’s lover asks: “What is it you even want out of life”? Her sole ambition is romantic love – “for as long as I could remember, all I had ever dreamed about was romance”.

The pronounced self-awareness of the characters in this collection is sure to grate on some readers. Explanatory lines and reflections abound. “It’s obvious that I’m trying to replicate something,” one narrator thinks, literally stating the obvious. Of course, in a collection titled Free Therapy, the emphasis on self-reflection is clearly deliberate. Ivory seems to play on the therapised language and behaviour that pervades in the internet age.

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