By Elyse Friedman. House of Anansi Press, 256 pp, $29.95, hardcover

Therapy can't help you. And who says you want it, anyway? You don't want to take up gambling or Valium. You don't want an affair. What you want is this: you want to be a baby. You want to be nursed. You want to latch on to a hard brown nipple and suck greedily. You want someone to stroke your hair and coo, "There there there”¦ You're a hungry boy, aren't you?" You want to be diapered, a binkie popped in your mouth. This is all you, a hard-working man with a wife and children, ask for. At $200 an hour, this is what you need to get through your life.

"The Soother", a spare, quirkily empathetic tale of a man who spends his days tending to his demanding job and family and just wants a little tender care, so to speak, is one of five shorts plus novella in Elyse Friedman's (Waking Beauty) willfully bent, instinctually witty, and ultimately rather melancholy collection, Long Story Short. Like "Baby Luke", most of Friedman's protagonists live lives that have gone wrong somehow. Or maybe they were never really going to go right.

Like science experiments, these six high-concept stories drop their misfit characters into cruelly ironic fantasies or harsh hyper-realities. In "Wonderful", a devilish reversal of It's a Wonderful Life, a jovial angel shows a suicidal man how much happier everyone in his life would be if he had never existed. "Are you sure you don't want to hop back in?" he asks the conflicted jumper. Sketch comedy–like "Truth" is a first-date dialogue between a couple who speak only their exact thoughts: "You're fatter than I thought you would be." "I have a lot of cellulite on my ass." It's cringe-inducingly funny (if a tad gimmicky), but there's mournfulness in these characters who speak our own terrible unspoken thoughts.

Perversely, a few of the shorts feel too short, and novella "A Bright Tragic Thing" too long. The story of a teenager who contacts a washed-up '80s sitcom star isn't quite as oddball, ironic, or poignant as it intends. But at least young Dave still has a shot. For most of Friedman's off-centre characters, the future doesn't look any shinier. Like the ladybug on its back on the book's cover, they simply can't – or won't – right themselves.