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The Good Story is a collection of email exchanges between novelist J.M. Coetzee and Arabella Kurtz, a clinical psychologist currently completing the psychotherapy training program at the Tavistock Clinic. Their correspondence, which began in 2008, concerns matters broadly relating to literature and psychoanalysis, though each narrows their respective fields considerably. Coetzee does so by turning his attention to how fictional narratives are constructed and the relationship this may have to how patients and therapists construct narratives about themselves and each other in analysis, Kurtz by generally adhering to a theoretically orthodox, primarily Freudian view of psychoanalysis.
The point of the book is, we gather, to witness how a novelist and a psychoanalyst sound and think when discussing matters of the greatest importance to both: namely, the stories human beings tell about themselves and others in an effort to describe what it is like for them (and others) to be a human being in conflict, and why and how such stories correspond with or diverge from historical or emotional truths. Coetzee, never having been in analysis himself, never having had clinical training of any kind, plays the part of curious amateur to Kurtz's wizened professional. In each of the eleven chapters of the book, Coetzee writes first, proposing questions and lines of inquiry to which Kurtz responds as psychoanalyst. The