The latest Sally Rooney-endorsed Irish writer makes a book-length debut with a short story collection that captures the experience of being a young woman today with a clear eye and a listless sigh. Crap jobs and a desire not to go to them, crap men and the desire still to go to them, and worse-than-crap housing are common themes in these airless stories of aimless women.
The title isn’t just cute: it’s no surprise when Rebecca Ivory thanks her therapists in her acknowledgment. She is excellent at revealing how our understanding of ourselves, and others, is a layered and silently shifting thing; she peels back what is said to expose the tender and embarrassing desires and delusions beneath. Her characters are frequently self-aware yet stuck – trapped in agonised inaction. They’re defeated by the most basic tasks; one fails to replace a lightbulb, another a broken bike light, as if preferring to simply stay in the dark.
