Author(s): Rebecca Ivory

Short Stories & Essays

Free Therapy heralds the arrival of a dazzling new voice in the vanguard of contemporary writing 'I ate it up in two sittings' Saba Sams, author of Send Nudes

Two teenage girls enter a destructive competition with one another, fixated on each other's bodies; a woman's encounter with her ex forces her to reflect on the women's group that saved her from the relationship; a couple's future is questioned after the damp expert they hired for their bathroom offers them free counselling, an older man's buried grief emerges during an altercation with a mother driving a 4x4; and over the course of a bitter winter a poor waitress lacks the money to fix an impacted tooth as the cracks begin to show in her precariously balanced life.

Free Therapy takes us into the inner lives of men and women who are versed in the language of therapy, possessed with the self-knowledge needed to change their lives, but finding themselves unwilling to doing it. As her characters try and fail to connect - via sex, friendship, screens and work - Ivory explores desire in all its forms, revealing the ways in which we posture and present, and the softness and insecurities that lie beneath.

Perfectly-observed, wry and illuminated by moments of sympathy and wisdom, Free Therapy shows us ourselves as we truly are.