Free Therapy

by Rebecca Ivory

A debut collection that heralds the arrival of a fresh and exciting new literary voice

Free Therapy is about people who know what they need to do in order to be happy, but can't quite bring themselves to do it; people who are driven by desires that don't quite match with what they're looking for in life; people who long to connect with others, but can't seem to allow themselves to. Helpless, hapless, lost in the mire of the modern world, the protagonists of Rebecca Ivory's stories nevertheless persist.

With a sharp, discerning eye and yet also a humane tenderness for the foibles of contemporary relationships - familial, platonic and romantic - Rebecca Ivory shows us the ways in which we posture and present ourselves, and the softness and insecurities that lie beneath. Echoing the wit and insight of Lorrie Moore and Curtis Sittenfeld, and situating herself within the vanguard of short fiction writers such as Nicole Flattery and Saba Sams, Free Therapy heralds the arrival of a fresh and exciting new talent.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Contemporary, Essays, Mental Health, Book Club, Ireland

187 pages, Kindle Edition

First published March 14, 2024

Reviews

[leah · Rating 3 out of 5]

a solid short story collection, where most of the stories focus on people navigating the anxieties of everyday life and relationships. my favourite stories were ‘push and pull’, ‘tiny wrestler’, and the titular story ‘free therapy’. looking forward to reading more from this author in the future.

[persephone ☾ · Rating 3 out of 5]

one life and fucking 10 000 ways to ruin it, the math ain't mathin

[Ariadna · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was excellent. The stories were real and relatable and served me a stark reminder that being a woman in your twenties was the absolute trenches and man ain’t shit.

[Ross · Rating 5 out of 5]

okay maybe i AM a short story girlie

[Karin · Rating 3 out of 5]

3⭐️

This is so difficult to rate.

It was an uncomfortable read for me, mainly because the characters were so annoying. But at the same time they‘re so realistic, and you kind of wish you weren‘t like them. Though I apologise to everyone who wrote „I feel seen!“ in their reviews, because I truly couldn‘t stand most of them.

I guess it‘s a book about the mundanity of life and the small dumb things we do. Idk. Since I keep thinking about it I guess it‘s a great piece of art. But I don‘t want to reread it, you know?

[Shy · Rating 1 out of 5]

Caveat: I only read this for a book club because otherwise I wouldn't have ever picked this up and having finished it I feel justified in my initial impression. I think this book must be aimed at younger audiences than middle aged women, or maybe I just don't get what's interesting about it. The short stories don't connect to each other and none of them really resolve anything. The entire book feels like endless character critiques of individuals. It's like that stereotype of a local busybody who gossips about everyone else endlessly to the point that no one else can get a word in edgewise only instead of gossip it's an internal monologue of each narrator criticising others and themselves. That's it. There's no growth, no development, no actual narrative, no resolution. The relationships depicted all appear unhealthy and sexist and the tone of every story just exudes monotonous misery and hopelessness that this is the best life has to offer. I can just about scrape together some empathy for one or two characters, with great difficulty, but most of them I just want to slap or shake.

[Marjolein Faes · Rating 4 out of 5]

Loved the complexity of the characters and how it was so easy to both love and hate them at the same time. All the nuances were so subtle yet so obvious as well, really liked this book!

[Renee · Rating 2 out of 5]

This wasn’t for me.

[Maria Benedita · Rating 5 out of 5]

I feel seen.

[Rojda · Rating 3 out of 5]

this is more of a short story collection about different people with different problems in different situations 😅 if you expect more you will be disappointed but I was thoroughly entertained

[Vartika · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a somewhat disappointing collection based on a very interesting premise – the inner lives of men and women who are well-versed in the language of therapy, possessed with the self-knowledge needed to change their lives, but ultimately unwilling to go through with doing it. I quite liked the first story, "Push and Pull", about the adolescent friendship between two girls sabotaged by competitive weight loss, but everything thereafter reads like something that has been done before, and better (likely by a rather established Irish writer of millennial disconnection and discontent whose enthusiastic endorsement features on the cover). I admired the moments where Ivory throws into relief the ways in which characters – and by extension, everyone – posture to others and to their own selves, but found her style generally lacklustre.In the hands of the right readership, though, Free Therapy may indeed be as fresh and arresting as the blurbs claim.

[Carolina · Rating 3 out of 5]

A terapia paga é melhor, mas este conjunto de short stories é meio que um bom teste de avaliação às competências adquiridas em consulta.

[Olivia · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think we might be looking at the next Sally Rooney

[Oleksandr Ladyzhenskyi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pretty relaxing, unexpectedly relatable

[William Reynolds · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fab debut short story collection, not groundbreaking by any means but so up my alley in exploring intriguing, complicated, self loathing characters and mental health through an authentic and grounded lens. Quality does drop in the back half of the collection, the characters morph more into vehicles for exploring human interaction rather than people in their own right but an accomplished book overall. Need to note the short story published originally in the stinging fly it slapped.

[clara o · Rating 2 out of 5]

(2.5 ⭐️) this is a collection of short stories that i had high hopes for, given the premise i saw, that this book is about people who have "the self-knowledge needed to change their lives, but finding themselves unwilling to doing so", which is super relatable 🫠🫠. thus i went into this book thinking it would be a cathartic read, with my messy thoughts being strung together into words for me. however i felt that was not really the case? while certain bits resonated, many didn't - i found myself enjoying the short stories to very different degrees. i have to say the first few stories hooked my attention, and my rating would be higher for those (3.25-3.5 perhaps, more on those below!), but the second half of the collection kinda fell short for me.

also, i think i might prefer a long, connected book, rather than separate short stories... i love a good character arc and resolution which can't be fleshed out as well in a chapter (especially with the themes in this collection?)

anyway i shan't talk about the stories that i didn't particularly like because i frankly don't really remember them, but my favourite stories would have to be "push and pull", "free therapy", and "work and charity".

the first one follows a toxic competition between a pair of teenage friends. there was an insidious undercurrent through the whole thing, as if i kinda knew that the whole weight thing wasn't all there was to the story. the angle of this story is quite unique, exploring jealousy, a girl's desire to "look good" from a young age, and how this possibly permeates into other parts of her life (relationships, as well as the odd craving yet distaste for attention?)

"free therapy" is about a woman, who joins a free therapy group after her relationship (actually a situationship) ends. i found parts of this relatable, particularly the bits about wanting to self-improve, but realising you're not actually happier from the self improvement because no one seems to be watching. the main character goes through ebbs and flows in her sense of self, even after becoming "more accomplished". the ending might seem hair-pulling and head-scratching, but i guess it shows how ingrained some of our issues are. seriously, that guy was living in the crevices of her brain...

besides "free therapy", i found myself relating the most to "work and charity". admittedly i read these short stories awhile back before i paused for a long while and finally completed the second half, so my memory is a little muddled, but i think this one touched upon the mundane nature of life, a lack of ambition and passivity? which is kinda me in a nutshell 😬

so if anyone reads this, i recommend those 3 stories!!! but maybe the other stories might resonate with different kinds of people! i guess the good thing about standalones is that there might be something for everyone in here, even if it's just a sole chapter

[Patryk Kawecki · Rating 2 out of 5]

very mediocre read. I was considering 1 star, but there were maybe two or three stories I read with some pleasure. it was so superficial and depressing, with no real message other than people having trouble finding happiness in their lives and not doing anything about it. this book had so much potential based on its description, but it just fell flat. :((

[Venus *ೃ༄ · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have a really complex relationship with this short story collection as Ivory is really good at writing realistic and complex women throughout as we divulge into these women’s psyches. She doesn’t shy away from those who do unlikeable things, however, the common theme of insecurities is ever present and I feel like it shows just how much it plagues women. Honestly they do really stress me out, the stories, and raise my heart rate because i’m so involved as I get so worried for the main characters in these stories so that’s really impressive. Sometimes I do get disappointed by some choices but it grows on me.

I feel fairly mixed in the first two stories as I enjoy their potential but by the end of story I’m disappointed in how Ivory does the pay off as I feel detached from the characters growth. It makes sense for how quickly we go from stages in life like in a blip but I feel like we miss out on a lot when all of a sudden they are reformed and regretful for what they did (for example in Push and Pull). I guess it makes sense for how quickly we can go from one thing to another in life before we know it without much reflection for the past, but as a reader I’m interested in the development and how we got to A to C cuz what happened at B you know? But I understand it’s a short story so it’s good for the conventions upholds to.

The second two stories feel less focused on the male gaze and rather on the psyche of women in their insecurities in life or family dynamics which i appreciate. Work and Charity has felt the most realistic to me as I fully felt like I was watching these circumstances unfold as I read.

I think in order to appreciate the stories fully, you have to let them shit with you as you grow and then you can see where it’s coming from as I definitely benefited from hindsight. I think these books will be a good corner stone of looking at how women in the early 2020s felt on the future, looking back. I’m excited to see what she does next.

——— ranking
1 Push and Pull - I enjoyed how taboo it was and twisted it was as you don’t normally get this perspective in stories like this, in my opinion. Like to have someone in this circumstance be such a villain and not mentally shy away from her thoughts of jealousy and sexually driven thoughts with her being an interesting take on teenager girlhood and intertwined friendships. As I stated at the start I don’t really like the jumps into the future from where these people have had development.

2 Removal

3 Lines to Keep - This just made me quiet sad how trauma can be held in the body and leads to how we treat ourselves, detach from reality or even have irritation towards those who chose to detach. I found some parts fairly relatable and it was quite sad to see it reflected. I’m really glad this story didn’t centre a time jump in development, it just accepted the past correlates to the pain and ways to cope in the future and only whispers the struggles they face. Also shows common miscommunications in families implying generational issues to just push past it and not face it which will only lead to more dismay.

4 The Slip - I cant lie, this story did almost make me want to DNF this short story collection but I’m glad I powered through it as it was interesting to have the perpective of a husband written from a woman’s perspective as it was understanding of both sides of the fall in their relationship and communication. The grief was handled with a lot of care and how it manifests every where in Colm’a life. It’s like his life is forever perpetually suspended as things happen to him as he feels underappreciated and walked over.

5 Free Therapy - For the title of this short story collection I wasn’t disappointed but the ending and where it ended disappointed me as I thought it was going to be about the commodification of wellness and therapy with using material physical things to seem like you are a reformed woman, as this is where capitalism has pushed us to (for example the Clean Girl aesthetic or Wongyoungism). I think now that I’ve taken a break from reading it has made me appreciate the story more as I was just so disappointed in the ending but I think that’s more effective as going back to her partner who clearly is insecure himself and doesn’t value women (a glorified man child) and how toxic desperation of having feelings reciprocated in a culture of situationships, I think the story has more value that I thought it did. While reading it, however, I didn’t enjoy how much it centred the man but i guess it makes sense for the toxic dynamic and how it’s a cycle is wanting validation and attention etc etc.

6 Work and Charity - Ivory is really good at making her characters seem like people and have some really painful moments, i could feel her insecurities through the page and her anxieties engulf me. I could imagine people i knew in these positions to as they grow older but it did stress me out a bit too much to fully enjoy it as someone with quite bad anxiety. By no means does this mean I think the story is bad though.

7 Arrivals - how do you burn scrambled egg, honestly? cuz ive seen it so commonly written ik it has a larger meaning but genuinely.

8 Tiny Wrestler - I mean it was something I read I guess?

9 Settling Down

[Hillary Paulino · Rating 4 out of 5]

Oh I ADORED this.

I read 95% of it on the drive up to Wicklow. Now I’m not a big lover of short stories but these stories by Rebecca Ivory made me feel so seen. I loved that most of the stories were visibly set in ireland - I truly felt like she encapsulated a lot of the holes and disappointments one may have living in this country.

Loved it.

[miss_may · Rating 5 out of 5]

5 ⭐

This is not a book that makes you happy but it is a book that makes you think. I don't think I ever was in any of the positions described in the short stories but the feelings it evoked in me made me relate to them. Really a fascinating read.

[Timetoread · Rating 2 out of 5]

prvi dve zgodbi kul, zanimivo, se poistovetla kr dost...pol je šlo pa samo še navzdol. glavn da je roza naslovnica, da vsaj kjut zgleda. drgac pa res ne vidm poante v napisanem. vse teme brez konca in kraja.

[malena · Rating 4 out of 5]

maybe the writing could‘ve been improved in a few places, and some of the stories felt too similar to each other.
but other than that I honestly really liked them, especially the last two. I enjoyed the subtle metaphors and authentic inner monologues.

[Tien · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5

[adeline · Rating 3 out of 5]

a nice short stories collection! i liked a few stories

[Vera Koskela · Rating 3 out of 5]

3,5

[Verity Elizabeth · Rating 4 out of 5]

A solid debut short story collection about women (and one man) who find themselves isolated in different ways. I enjoyed the brief snapshots of moments in time; of the elevation of the mundane decision-making which profoundly shapes our lives.

[Paulien De Gaspari · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.75 ⭐️

Not my cup of tea although I could relate to some stories

[Pearl · Rating 4 out of 5]

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️.5

[Becca Miller · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’ve recently started exploring the short story genre and I devoured this. I found some of the stories very poetic and beautiful with some well established under themes, I feel I missed the premise of a couple, and that’s okay. Different people will take different things from this book and that is beautiful.

[Elise]

Too many short stories to give one rating
My favourites were Free Therapy, Lines to Keep, Work and Charity, and Arrivals