The British writer returns with Big Kiss, Bye-Bye, a novel about desire, identity and attraction, arguing that dating apps have made love increasingly predictable and transactional.
British writer Claire-Louise Bennett believes love should be an experience built on difference, chance and risk — three elements she says are increasingly difficult to find in a world shaped by dating apps.
Bennett, the author of Pond and Checkout 19, explores desire, identity and the mysteries of attraction in her latest novel, Big Kiss, Bye-Bye. The intensely interior book takes the form of a long, obsessive conversation between two lovers and examines the ways intimacy can alter a person’s understanding of themselves.
For Bennett, love is more than an emotional connection. It can act as an existential compass, revealing aspects of ourselves that might otherwise remain hidden.
Speaking from her home in Galway, Ireland, Bennett said modern dating culture increasingly encourages people to approach relationships through the idea of compatibility. Dating apps, she argues, push people to define what they want from a partner and what they expect from a relationship before they have even met.
That can make relationships feel transactional, she said, because people are effectively encouraged to search for someone who fits an existing idea of who they are.
Bennett takes the opposite view of love. Rather than confirming an established identity, she believes it can challenge and transform it.
“Love is the great revealer,” she said, describing attraction that develops unexpectedly in real life as both powerful and unsettling. Such encounters can expose parts of a person that they had never imagined, much less acknowledged.
Her thinking is partly influenced by French philosopher Alain Badiou’s In Praise of Love, as well as the work of writer Anaïs Nin. Bennett admires Nin’s resistance to the idea of a fixed personality and her belief that people should remain capable of continual transformation.
For Bennett, intimate relationships can produce precisely that kind of movement. They can disrupt a person’s sense of identity, overturn their assumptions and take them far from the person they believed themselves to be.
Writing as a space for disorder
The same uncertainty runs through Bennett’s approach to writing.
She says she sometimes feels that she does not possess a fixed self. Instead, she describes herself as a place where different forces — including archetypes, psychological patterns, impulses and personal and collective memories — coexist and sometimes conflict.
Much of that inner world remains unknown even to her, although she believes those hidden elements have a profound influence on everyday life.
Writing might appear to offer a way of organising that chaos, but Bennett does not see clarification as its primary purpose. Drawing on Samuel Beckett’s idea of the artist’s role, she argues that literature should make room for disorder rather than attempt to resolve it.
That philosophy helps explain the shifting nature of her fiction. Bennett describes her writing as a winding path filled with false starts, dead ends and overgrown landscapes, occasionally opening into moments of respite and connection.
She does not write to establish certainty, she says, but through denial, subversion and disruption.
Even reality itself remains uncertain in Bennett’s work. Although she acknowledges that people need some degree of faith in reality in order to live, she says she ultimately doubts that what we call reality exists in any fixed or definitive sense.
In Big Kiss, Bye-Bye, that uncertainty becomes part of the experience of love itself: an encounter that cannot be fully planned, controlled or reduced to a list of compatible characteristics.
For Bennett, it is precisely that unpredictability that gives love its transformative power.
Be First to Comment