Since the publication of her debut, Pond, in 2015, Claire-Louise Bennett has quietly become one of the most revered writers at work in Ireland today. Her second book, the 2021 novel Checkout 19, was a New York Times top 10 book of the year. Her latest book, Big Kiss, Bye-Bye, is published by the discerning Fitzcarraldo Editions, which has a habit of publishing writers that go on to win Nobel Prizes (laureates Annie Ernaux and Jon Fosse are on their very select list).
Bennett grew up in working-class Wiltshire in England, and studied literature and drama at the University of Roehampton London before moving to Galway, where she has lived for more than two decades. We meet in the suburb of Oranmore, in a newly opened restaurant called Fawn. Bennett is warm and open, brimming with energy, curiosity and an honest desire to connect, much like her latest book.
Big Kiss, Bye-Bye follows the relationship of a female narrator with an older man called Xavier, and the detransition of their relationship from romantic to something else. “There’s something very irrational about the relationship,” she says, over exquisitely prepared small plates of food. “I think in dating culture as it is at the moment, it just seems very rational. There’s a lot of assessment and self-presentation and it’s all very consciously done. It’s as if people know what it is they want and I don’t really think you know what you want in the context of love, I just don’t think you really can.”
The relationship also acts as a literary device, in that it operates as a conductor through which Bennett can explore bigger ideas, like what it feels like to experience memory, time, love and loss. She has said that Big Kiss, Bye-Bye is the beginning of a new phase of work for her that gets into areas of private life that she has wanted to explore artistically for a very long time. “I wanted it to be very feeling-driven. That was one thing I remember coming across in the Beckett archive, where he said, ‘I’m no intellectual, all I am is feeling.’ I was so struck by that because with any creative challenge or interest, you can approach it intellectually – which is fine, and I do – but I really just wanted to come at this with a very different sort of intelligence.”
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The book is a rare experience to read, managing to be almost overwhelmingly emotional while also being linguistically, formally and philosophically engaging. Language is at the forefront of Bennett’s work. “As much as whatever I write might be drawing on intellectual interests or direct experience, I’m also very aware that writing is words – it’s not experience, it’s not me, it is words. I have very particular ways of thinking about what words are. They feel very active, I’m very conscious of them as things. I think that’s why I maybe get a bit frustrated when invariably conversation turns to how biographical [my books] are, because the work is very made, it’s very crafted. I enjoy the creating element, and I wouldn’t want to feel restricted, which I think I would if I had to write in a more straight-up autobiographical way. It wouldn’t interest me at all to write like that. I’d find it really quite dull.”
She traces the origins of the novel to a series of events in her life. One was a house move from Galway city to its outskirts. “[Moving house] is a huge upheaval and it does show you very clearly the life you have accumulated. For someone who has a bit more stability in their lives and a home they stay in for years on end, they’re not really put in this position very often, where they have to go through each and every thing and weigh it all up. I’ve got lots and lots of old notebooks and diaries that cover things I might be interested in intellectually or as an academic or just creatively, and then more personal writing – letters, unsent letters – a whole sort of paper trail of life.”
Another catalyst was a stint spent as a creative fellow at Reading University, where Samuel Beckett’s archive is held. “Of course, he was a great archivist in his own work and he was really concerned with memory and preserving memories, so that was something I became interested in.” Reading through Beckett’s archive and discovering how he thought about the past, gave her a path into her own book. “When I was doing it on my own, I felt quite vulnerable. It can be quite upsetting going back over old things, so in a sense having this external, more objective element of Beckett made me feel like I had some sort of ally helping me through.”
She was also thinking of people from her past, which made her curious as to how individuals can continue to exist in our psyches, long after contact may have ceased. “It’s difficult to know exactly how it is they live in us, but they have some sort of ongoing, post-reality existence.”
I wonder what drives the urge to write. “I like doing it,” she says simply. “It just feels like this very interesting interplay between me and language, it’s like we’re both figuring each other out. That’s why I suppose I don’t write straightforward narratives. As much as anything, my books are an expression of that interplay.”
Bennett has no interest in explaining her work. She wants readers to have their own personal response. “When you write a book, you really want people to be able to have a very one-to-one experience with it. It’s great the way reading culture is, but it’s also very public and very communal. I love the feeling of being with a book and feeling like you’re the only person in the world who has read it. The feeling is just so personal between you and the book, and I guess I just want to revive some of that in a way.”
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She will go so far as to say the novel is about love and time, and how people come and go from our lives, and she writes with great tenderness about that aspect of relationships. “A lot of the time these things aren’t handled that well; we’re just not that great at handling each other. It’s kind of shocking in a way. It feels like technology is allowing us to become even more cowardly and callous. Well all right, you might not have any use for [someone] any more, or you can’t fit them in any more, but you can send them on their way with their heart intact and feeling okay, because they haven’t actually done anything wrong by being interested in you. People don’t feel like taking those risks any more because there’s so much shame around it, there’s all that vulnerability. But it’s just the most important thing in the world, it’s the only thing in the world – being close. It doesn’t matter if it’s a sexual thing or a friendship thing, just spending time and paying attention to someone, and someone paying attention to you, is the most beautiful thing. It makes anybody feel better.”
Big Kiss, Bye-Bye is published by Fitzcarraldo Editions
