Modern life is tough on young people, and perhaps toughest on the generation whose adolescence and early adulthood has been indelibly marked by Brexit, the Covid-19 lockdowns, war in Europe, economic recession and the mixed blessings of social media. Beneath the looming shadow of the impacts of climate change, Gen Z, the so-called zoomers, are hanging onto the rails on a rollercoaster ride through the social, economic, environmental and political chaos of modern life, and their mental health is suffering. Psychotherapist Jeanine Connor turns her focus to this generation in another series of vivid portraits of what goes on behind the doors of her therapy room. We meet Stan, standing on the threshold of adulthood and grappling with love, sex and death; Preesha, the social influencer, whose life is being shaped by the demands of the media and its conflicts with her cultural family history, and Drew, whose vivid dreams hint at a sexuality that flies in the face of all his notions of masculinity. We sit alongside Keziah, who doesn't 'need' therapy but whose (literally) f*cking mother provides the title (and connecting theme) for the book; Morgan, whose emotionless exterior belies a traumatic childhood, and Bea, the beauty, who wants the fairy tale ending, but not if it reduces her to the status of arm-candy on the biceps of the beast. These therapeutic snapshots bring to life the theories pioneered by Freud and his descendants and make compulsive reading for all those concerned with the human psyche and the struggles of young adults in the Western industrialised world today. They illustrate how mothers show up in (almost) everybody's psychotherapy, and how they, their and our own heritages and baggage shape us all.
