Across seven decades, Alan Bennett has revealed a great deal of himself through plays and screenplays. In 1994, with the publication Writing Home, his first volume of diaries, culled from the London Review of Books column he started writing in 1983, he began revealing a good deal more. Enough Said is his fourth collection (leaving aside the 64-page House Arrest: Pandemic Diaries) and likely his final, as the title implies.
Strictly speaking, an epistolary novel tells more than one story. You could say, for example, that Dracula is “about” a collection of letters and diary entries and in the same vein, that Claire-Louise Bennett’s new book is “about” a woman’s writing. Really, Big Kiss, Bye-Bye follows the end of a single relationship, but the framing – a journal of sorts, containing various letters and emails – allows Bennett to chart a woman’s shifting, lifelong attitudes to intimacy.
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