An unnamed 40-year-old, Protagonist writer of Big Kiss, Bye-Bye, who grew up in the South West of England before moving to Ireland, struggle to explain to her lover why she can’t explain how she feels: “ Somethings are resistant to words maybe, and when you start trying to apply them you end up with something else, another thing a theory, I suppose” Claire-Louise Bennett clarify – how easily language falls into pre-formulated phrases that fail to capture our intended meaning- how we “end up saying things that relate to an idea, rather than to the experience itself”. The protagonist’s unorthodox relationship with the elderly, divorced, formerly wealthy Xavier – a relationship indefinably suspended between friendship, companionship and romantic love. The most intimate scenes between the two are the night they spend talking together in bed after the narrator has returned early from various parties, with Xavier’s words slightly slurred from not wearing his dentures.

The protagonist claims that, from “the early days” she “understood and accepted that” she would “be beside him when he dies”. 

Related in parallel with the narrator’s attempts to reconnect with Xavier after a long hiatus in their 10-year relationship are the emails she sporadically exchanged with Terence, her former English A-level teacher- a correspondence overshadowed by their shared knowledge of narrator’s teenage affair with Terence’s colleague. Bennett cites some incidents and observations being retold multiple times across the boo, as when the narrator repeatedly remarks on Xavier’s solicitousness whenever she was menstruating.

Yet these repetitions are crucial to conveying the obsessiveness with which we can become preoccupied with a limited number of more or less trivial facts, which through the very intensity of our preoccupation come to define our, sense of ourselves and others. 

The things that hold life in place have been lifted off and put away. Uprooted by circumstances from city to deep countryside, a woman lives in temporary limbo, visited by memories of all she’s left behind. The most insistent are those of Xavier, who has always been certain he known her better than anyone, better than she knows herself.

Xavier, whom she still loves but no longer desires, a displacement he has been unable to accept. An unexpected letter from an old acquaintance brings back a torrent of others she’s loved or wanted. Each has been a match and a mismatch, a liberation and a threat to her very sense of self. The ephemera left by their passage- a spilled coffee, an unwanted bouquet, a mind-blowing kiss – make up a cabinet of curiosity she inventories trying to divine the essence of intimacy. What does it mean to connect with another person? What impels us to touch someone, to be touched by them, to stay in touch? How do we let them go? 

Bennett explores the mystery of how people come into and go out of our lives, leaving us forever in their grasp.

Big Kiss, Bye-Bye by Claire-Louise Bennett, Fitzcarraldo Editions £12.99, 168 pages.