Claire-Louise Bennett: 'Big Kiss, Bye-Bye' at the Southbank Centre

Photo from Steven Miller, Creative Commons

Novelist Claire-Louise Bennett appeared in conversation with writer and psychoanalyst Josh Cohen as part of the 2025 London Literature Festival at the Southbank Centre. Bennett’s acclaimed first book Pond (2015), a short story collection, was shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize, and her novel Checkout 19 (2021) was a 'Books of 2021' pick in The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph, and The New Statesman. Her latest, “Elatingly risky” (The Guardian) novel, Big Kiss, Bye-Bye (2025) is centred around a relationship between an unnamed protagonist in her forties and Xavier, a formerly wealthy (though still not badly-off) ex-financier in his seventies.

Bennett and Cohen had only met twenty minutes before the event, though they seemed at ease in one another’s company, both elegantly dressed beneath the Brutalist décor of the Southbank’s Purcell Room. It was easy to forget it was Halloween. Not wholly inappropriate, however, given the ghosts of the past circulating back and forth for the protagonist of Bennett’s latest novel.

The intimate discussion ranged from medieval theology to time and memory – “‘The limits of what you can […] know with your mind” – interspersed with a couple of readings from Bennett’s latest book, delightfully narrated in the writer’s soft West Country accent.   

Big Kiss, Bye-Bye is a stream of consciousness narrative, rippling with intimations about love and selfhood. The novel’s familiar writer-protagonist and confessional tone affirm the autofiction label often applied to Bennett’s writing. “There was such a coherence between how Bennett spoke about her work, and the work itself,” audience member Zuzia reflected after the event, a sentiment likewise expressed by Cohen.

While it can sometimes be misleading to presume an indivisible relationship between writer and narrator, Bennett echoed her protagonist’s intricate digressions and defiant tone. “People get a bit snarky about me being repetitive. I don’t know why,” she said. Things “just stick in your head, don’t they? […] It’s irritating in a way […] I get sick of my own mind”. Bennet was asked about the way events seem to occur simultaneously rather than chronologically in the novel. It was a long, winding question, and Bennett’s request that Cohen repeat it was met with affectionate chuckles from the audience, charmed, perhaps, by that coherence between writer and her writing. “I suppose it’s to do with my feeling […] about memory, because in a sense time is intertwined with memory,” Bennett responded. “I don’t have a very good memory. That was something that really bothered me for quite a long time.” But after reading that Carl Jung had confessed to a bad memory, she “didn’t feel too bad”. Jung did have a good memory concerning things from his inner life, Bennett explained. She recalls her childhood dreams with clarity; dreams, unsurprisingly, feature heavily in Big Kiss.

To elucidate the relationship between memory, repetition and writing, Bennett relayed an anecdote about Samuel Beckett, who, when holding his mother’s hand as a child, remarked that the sky was perhaps closer than it seemed. Beckett’s mother became annoyed and snatched away her hand. Samuel Beckett recalls this incident in three separate works, each occurrence being slightly different. In one of them, Beckett’s mother tells him to “Fuck off”. A biographer had explained to Bennett that she wouldn’t likely have said this. “She might have done, you don’t know, do you.” There was a murmur of giggles from the audience. “Anyone might say it, really.”

The novel’s primary theme is of course love: something of a shadowy enigma for Bennett’s characters. Solving the mysteries of love and relationships is, however, not her intention.

Where many of us accept the idea that books are supposed to tell us something, Bennett is wearied by language which insists on empirical knowledge. “I don’t like being told things very much. I find it irritating”. She discovered an antidote: a book by a fourteenth century Carthusian monk – “We don’t know his name” – called The Cloud of Unknowing. The text is in the tradition of negative theology, which seeks to understand God by what He is not, rather than what He is. “When you’re reading a book which untells itself as it expresses itself, it’s just this completely amazing experience […] it proceeds by negation […] it contradicts itself.” This relates to the understanding Christian mystics had of love and its ineffability.

In Big Kiss, too, there is an unwillingness to pare down meaning to digestible concepts. There are no conclusions. Bennett’s dense, meandering paragraphs digress into disparate memories and occasional paranoid self-doubts, resisting the aphoristic.

As with her meditative prose, Bennett considered Cohen’s questions with thoughtful, dreamlike pauses. Her responses were compelling, while avoiding being definitive. There is a sense that diverting from pinning down meaning opens up wider possibilities. “The fewer concepts you have about [love] the more it can kind of move within you.”

Cohen asked Bennet what made her write about love from the perspective of an ending (the novel begins with the Bye-Bye of its title and ends on the Big Kiss). “A lot of love stories are about the beginnings of love,” she responded, alighting on her unwillingness to focus on a typical “will they or won’t they” tension. She writes “not about love”, but rather from “inside it”.

Both Cohen and Bennett allowed for the subtle complexities of this writing inside of love, rather than about love. Although Xavier is an entitled “typical boomer man”, there is a sense that maybe he “understands more than he’s letting on,” said Cohen. “That’s nice that that’s there” replied Bennet, before reversing her role to interviewer - “how does that come across?” More laughter from the audience.

I detected a divergence between writer and narrator. The latter can at times be unreasonable, even unkind. Perhaps Bennett, like most of us, was merely on her best behaviour in public, though she doesn’t come across as disingenuous. Not that the reader should wish away the narrator’s more biting traits - it makes her seem more human. Xavier may be a nuisance, but an idealised protagonist might nudge the novel into a mere character assassination and therefore lose some of its subtleties.

While both Bennett and her work can be playful, there are darker, difficult themes. A correspondence between the narrator and her former A-Level English teacher elicits the recollection of “dealings” between herself and another male college teacher, Turner. Cohen asked Bennett why she chose to avoid the “familiar” language of “abuse” for this episode. “It is slightly ambiguous,” Bennett said, “this strange place between sixteen and eighteen […] you’re neither one thing nor the other […] you’re still pretty immature but in other ways you’re sort of not.” This episode in the novel is uncomfortable; while there is anger directed towards Turner, there isn’t the kind of persecutory judgement one might expect of an adult recalling what appears to be a teacher-student relationship. “I don’t tend to [judge] too much in my own life […] I’m too curious in a way.”

Bennett pushed back against Cohen’s question somewhat. “There’s not anything to suggest they had sex”. It isn’t that sort of book, she continued, resisting any attempt to amplify it so that it becomes a book about abuse. “The bigger abuse [...] is when we don’t get the scale of someone’s feelings. […] We either reduce them, or we amplify them to suit whatever agenda we might have.”

There is no big reveal about what those murky “dealings” turn out to be. We are left with the ineffable – and its possibilities. At the close of Friday’s final reading, Bennett’s protagonist is struck by the way Xavier looks at her. “It was unnerving and thrilling to stand there like that, stand there before him with nothing. She could be anyone, couldn’t she? She could be anyone.”

Big Kiss, Bye-Bye (Fitzcarraldo Editions) is available now.

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Edited by Dan Ramos Lay, Literature Editor