“And the days, I write the days in green, and the things I need, the things I need – I write those in green too.”
As I prepare for next year’s Booker season, let me go ahead and say that Claire-Louise Bennett’s Big Kiss, Bye-Bye (Riverhead 2025) stands alone at this point in time on my “want to see this listed” list. I’ve never read Bennett before, but it reminded me of the things I like about Patricia Lockwood – a modern madness of storytelling that also seems kissed with Kate Chopin and Charlotte Perkins Gilman.
The ”story” is one of memories – of past loves and past moments. Sometimes the novel is in first person, but sometimes our unnamed narrator, an author, switches to third, viewing a situation from a protective distance. It jumps and hiccups and skips and cries, looping back and over itself, moments repeated (though memory may have changed by the subsequent retelling).
It’s framed with a relationship with an older man, Xavier, but it’s laced with the relationship with a different older man when she’s much younger. A minor. An English professor. A man who shows back up to be remembered in the life of someone with a bit of fame and renown now. The hold these men still have over her – the ways they’ve marked her life – carries the pages forward. (The serial killer is a flash in the pan, a memory of panic.)
As for me, I don’t think this is a “break up” novel. Perhaps I’m a bit morose today, but I think it’s a dying woman counting her days by remembering her past and needing more time, more green, while waiting for that last kiss goodbye.
A Girl Named Tommi 