Free Therapy – Rebecca Ivory

Nine honest, moving stories about people struggling to negotiate relationships and unprivileged lives.
 
Rebecca Ivory is very good at dissecting and laying bare feelings that often lead her characters nowhere. Young women who see the systemic limits on their ambitions and lack the motivation to work at all, or who expect little in a new relationship with a boy and don’t even get that. The disconnect between people is no more evident than on a first date.
 
Tellingly, being imperfect, neither do her people give much of themselves. In this way, Ivory gives a voice to the voiceless many without making them into victims, neither bitter nor definitively resigned, but certainly lost to insecurities and a general feeling of helplessness in a society that does not know how to support one another.
 
The stories tend to end with situations unresolved, leaving us with a sense of having seen into someone’s life during a brief, real connection.
 
This is Ivory’s first published collection. If the arresting cover attracts attention to her book, it is well deserved.