‘The point of therapy, I’d always thought, was it was the place where you could voice the shameful buried feelings you had about your loved ones without being judged. With Janet I’d begin outlining my dark secrets and when I glanced up at her I’d see her looking slightly bored.’

In the spring issue of the Dublin Review, Patrick Freyne observes that ‘Our collective psychic pain has become almost boring, and our different diagnoses seem prosaic and clinical, and writing about them isn’t taboo or exotic anymore.’ Undaunted, he writes about them anyway – the various quirks and wobbles that he wishes he could describe in a nineteenth-century lexicon (‘neurasthenia’, ‘nerve disorders’, ‘brain fever’ ) – and the result is moving and hilarious.

Also in the spring Dublin Review, Roisin Kiberd writes about her first visit to Cambridge since graduating from Magdalen College nearly a decade ago. She recalls the confusion and discomfort of her student years and reflects on the strange relationship between past, present and future in a place where English theme park meets tech vanguard. In ‘The Room’, Ayşegül Savaş tells the uncanny story of a young woman who rents a tiny room in Paris and tries to live the life of a writer. Ian Sansom’s diary brings us through another bewildering year. Also, short stories by Claire Bamber, Ríona Judge McCormack, Vashti Kincaid-Smith and Cathy Sweeney.