Jodie Comer is apparently already attached to a planned HBO adaptation of this smart and sexy oddball rom-com which pivots on an affair between Greta and Flavia, who meet in a dog park. Except that unbeknownst to Flavia, Greta is by chance already privy to some of Flavia’s darker secrets thanks to her work as a therapy session transcriber, meaning she knows that 28 year-old Flavia, who is married, has never had an orgasm and that eight years ago she was terribly beaten up by a stranger she met in a diner. Greta has several issues of her own, including unaddressed questions about her mother’s suicide, but if you are already rolling your inner eye at yet another novel about damaged women dealing with trauma then fear not: Beagin seems to write with one eyebrow permanently raised without undermining the sincerity of her characters or their actions. The bedroom antics are filthy enough to make heterosexual women wonder what they’ve been missing, but the real pleasure lies in Beagin’s unerring ear both for precarious comedy and for all that is fatuous about modern life, including the culture of therapy itself. “Trauma people are almost as unbearable to me as Trump people,” says Flavia. “If you try suggesting they let go of.. their victimhood, they act re-traumatised.”
