“The thing that I was interested in was the idea of race as both a construct — as something that can be performed — but also the idea of race as a very lived reality.' britrbennett speaks to us about her timely second novel, TheVanishingHalf.
, centers on identical light-skinned Black twins Desiree and Stella Vignes, who grew up in Mallard, a setting inspired by a conversation Bennett had with her mother about a Louisiana town where people intermarried to produce progressively lighter-skinned Black children.
The twins leave home as teens — Desiree marries a dark-skinned Black man and has a daughter named Jude before returning to Mallard more than a decade later; Stella disappears, severing ties with her sister and embarking on a new life, as a white-passing woman. “I started to think about this place that was governed by skin color, what it would be like to live in a place like that, and also what it would be like to escape from a place like that,” Bennett says regarding the origin of her novel.Stella and Desiree’s lives, which were once so intrinsically linked, diverge immeasurably as the former marries a white man who knows nothing of her past.
“Something I’m constantly thinking about is the idea that you can share genetics with people and grow up in the same household and turn out to be completely different people,” Bennett says. “I have very close relationships with my sisters, so part of writing the book was imagining what are the choices that would lead Stella to not only disavow her race or her culture, but also her family and her sister who is the closest person to her in the world.
I think of myself as a fairly avid reader, and that nostalgic feeling of not being able to put a book down, like I’m poring overmagazines and memorabilia for, is something that still feels so rare, especially in a time when focusing on anything other than the horrors of our current reality can be such a mental challenge. You can callThe Vanishing Half is now available at booksellers nationwide.
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