‘I’m interested in how people exist in our minds’: Writer Claire-Louise Bennett • FRANCE 24

Now it’s time for today’s perspective and her new book has been described as a real to the force of fiction. Big kiss bye-bye by Cla Louise Bennett explores the mystery of how people come into and go out of our lives leaving us forever in their grasp. The book being presented at the English language bookshop here in Paris Shakespeare and Company tonight but we can present it for you here as well now because author Cla Louise Bennett is joining me here on set. Great to have you with us on the program today. Um tell us more about the book first of all. Um the woman a narrator in the book she is the narrator moves from the city to the deep countryside. Yeah. So um yeah there’s been a bit of upheaval in the sense that the shift from where she’s been living for some time to the country isn’t maybe out of choice. Um circumstances have made it necessary for her to relocate temporarily. So and that’s something that’s happened a lot throughout my life actually and in a lot of people’s lives now. I think there’s this sort of general precarious sort of uh situation for people. So moving is it’s a big thing. It’s you know there’s all the packing you have to do but also there’s a sense of going through things and when you’re packing and you’re selecting and you’re arranging and you’re confronted with um different memories I suppose it stirs up things. Yeah. So she she doesn’t settle very well does it? But those memories kind of blur up if you like through her. Yeah. they come up and she thinks about I guess the various people that have come in and out of her life. Um, and I suppose she dwells or and and the story dwells mostly on a most recent kind of uh relationship with a with a much older man that she was with for some time. And then there’s a sense that maybe their relationship kind of evolved into something more platonic which he didn’t seem to be particularly happy about. um the idea of being friends with her just didn’t really necessarily uh satisfy me completely. Um so yeah, that’s where she’s at really. So it’s like it’s like a reflection. She’s kind of reflecting I suppose on the things and the and the mainly the men that she’s met over her life. It’s a reflection, but at the same time it thinks about the ways I suppose that people still kind of live within us in in the present sense as well. Um, I was sort of interested in that and I’m just sort of I guess interested in how people exist in our minds. I just find that very interesting in a way like how we I don’t know the ideas we have about a person and what that has to do with who they really are and can we even talk about how a person really is. What does that kind of mean? And I think particularly when you first meet a person, you know, you bring so much to that because you have your own needs, I suppose, and your own ideas and expectations and you can just kind of project a lot of that onto yourself. I know what you mean. I know what you mean. Quite a few of the men in it, um, don’t come out of it particularly well, should we say. No, apparently not. I didn’t really think about it that way. I mean, they could have come out of it worse as well. Yeah, true. Um, yeah. So, you thought that maybe they they didn’t. No, no, no. It’s just interesting. I mean, I wonder how, you know, without getting too personal, I wonder whether, you know, part of that is is part of you. I mean, how much of it is a a reflection of just the narrator as as a narrator or how much of it is is things and circumstances that you’ve come across yourself? How much of the narrator is you, I suppos? Okay. I guess well I mean when I’m writing there’s no point me pretending that I haven’t had a life you know I I have lived and um that you you reach a point in your life when you you realize that you’ve lived actually quite a lot all of a sudden you’re like oh wow actually I’ve been around for quite a while now and had various experiences. So yeah it certainly would be informed by by my own direct encounters to some to some extent. Yeah. Um, but I don’t think it’s um I don’t think it’s an unkind portrayal. Um, and I would think there is quite a lot of tenderness in it and humor as well. So, even though some of the the male characters might not be the best, I don’t I don’t know that they’re treated particularly asically. It’s interesting to know that it’s not done maybe not deliberately is the word, but you know, out of out of real thought. It just I’m afraid that’s just sort of happened like that. Yeah. And what about the moving part of it? You said you’d moved around a lot and and you grew up in Wiltshire, which is quite a rural county in the UK and moved moves to to rural Ireland as it were. I mean, is is that part of it as well? That that move something that um you very much wanted to write about? Um well, I’ve been in Ireland for over 20 years now. Um, and I suppose again it’s I don’t necessarily deliberately plan to write about certain themes that are a kind of maybe um important or on people’s minds at the moment, but they’re just part of they’re just part of the background of my life, I suppose. Like there’s a kind of a sense of co in it as well. COVID 19 having just maybe um people are coming out of lockdown I think around this time that the book’s written which is I suppose pertinent in a sense because the book does deal a lot with the idea of intimacy and touch and um paying attention to a person and onetoone engagement and of course during co that all of that was made very very very difficult. So in a way this chart’s also that very tentative coming back together and almost like feeling it out again social spaces. Um so yeah those themes are I think they’re just sort of woven in quite quite naturally without a kind of a big deal being being made of them. But yeah sure I mean moving about a lot has been it’s been tough the backdrop to my to my life. Has it been tough though? Yeah it is tough. It’s a pain. It’s a pain in the neck. Yeah, that’s one way of putting it. Yeah. But it’s it’s a situation that a lot of people are in, right? Yeah. Yeah. I don’t take it personally. Well, you kind of do after a while, you know, but um yeah, it’s just the way it goes. And and it is it is a big upheaval in it and it becomes uh more and more so because it’s interesting how much stuff you kind of acquire and you become quite conscious of that. I think when you’re in a place that you’re situated in for a long time, you almost don’t see your things anymore in a way. you know, it’s just sort of there and there. You don’t have to think about it or assess it or wonder why you still have it or if it’s any use to you anymore or any of those questions, you know. What about the writing? I mean, you’ve had a pretty impressive, let’s be honest, few years in the literatur pond shortlisted for a top prize 2016. Your second one, check out 19. Uh even one of New York Times’s 10 best books of 2022. I mean, what’s it been like discovering, if you like, the literary world and and doing so well in it so quickly? Oh, good. I’m glad you I’m glad it seems that way. Yeah. I I I wonder it’s been great really, I suppose. Yeah. Yeah, it has been great. I mean, I I started publishing, I suppose, relatively late. I was in my in my late 30s, even though I’ve been writing for a very, very long time. So, making that transition really from being a very private writer for so long to then being a public writer was quite strange actually. It was quite a a peculiar transition um because it had always been something just a very private thing that I’d done. Um and it wasn’t something that I really talked about very much or needed to talk about. Um but it is I mean it is lovely to to have opportunities to have that like you and come to Paris and all those wonderful things. Absolutely. Good to have you with us on the program today. Thanks very much for coming in and telling us about the book. author Claire Louise Bennett. The book uh called, as I said, Big Kiss by Bye-Bye by Cla Louise Bennett being presented tonight as well at Shakespeare Company. So, if you happen to be in Paris, you can go along and join in with that. That would be great. Great to have you with us on the Thank you, Stuart. Thank

A renowned author has spoken to FRANCE 24 about how she’s fascinated by the way people exist in our minds, and the ideas we have about those people. Claire-Louise Bennett’s new book “Big Kiss, Bye-Bye” follows the narrator as she moves from the city to the countryside. The move leads her to confront her different memories and think about the people who have come in and out of her life. The author spoke to us in Perspective.
#culture #literature #memories

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