Brit Bennett's 'The Vanishing Half' Tackles Race, Colorism, and Identity

Margaret Hargrove: I'm Audible editor, Margaret Hargrove, and I'm thrilled to be talking today with author, Brit Bennett. Her 2016 debut novel, The Mothers, was a breakout success that drew comparisons to Toni Morrison and propelled Bennett to the National Book Foundation's 5 Under 35 list. She's back with The Vanishing Half, a stunning new novel about twin sisters, inseparable as children, who ultimately choose to live in two very different worlds — one Black and one White. Brit, thanks so much for joining me today.

Brit Bennett: Thanks for having me.

MH: So your debut novel, The Mothers, was released in 2016, and I read that you famously started writing it when you were only 17, and you kept working on it for seven years while you were undergrad at Stanford and getting your MFA at the University of Michigan. So how have you grown as a writer since then?

BB: That's a great question. I think writing the second book was something that definitely forced me to grow in a lot of ways. I think just one thing is just psychologically, it was a completely different experience than writing my debut novel, which as you said, I started when I was very young, and I worked on it for seven or eight years, however long that was, and I worked on it just privately. I showed it to some mentors that I worked with, but I never had any expectation that it would someday be published or that people who didn't know me with some day read it.

So in some ways, it was a very freeing experience just to be working on this project for a while, versus The Vanishing Half, which I then had an expectation that strangers would be reading the book. That was something that I had to sort of combat as a writer, was how to get around that self-consciousness, how to branch out and write a very different type of story. I think The Vanishing Half is a much bigger novel in a lot of ways than The Mothers, so it required me to kind of go to war with myself a little bit as I was writing it. I think that every project demands that of you in a different way.

MH: Did you feel any pressure when it came to following up such a well-received debut?

BB: I think a bit. Yeah. That was something I also had to contend with, because I didn't want to disappoint the readers who enjoyed The Mothers, but at the same time, I knew that I did not want to write The Mothers again. I knew I wanted to do something that was going to be different and that I was going to be writing in a different place, in a different time, in a different narrative. I knew that I wanted to do these new things. So I think that that was something that I also felt a little bit. I think I was lucky that I started The Vanishing Half before The Mothers came out, so I had some of the kind of seeds of the story in place before I got caught up in a little bit of the whirlwind that became that experience.

MH: So The Vanishing Half, so many things; one, it opens in 1968, we have identical twin sisters, Stella and Desiree. They flee their small Black community of Mallard Louisiana for the big city of New Orleans. Fourteen years later, Desiree comes back her sister, and we find out that Stella is now living in Brentwood, California as a White woman. So there's a lot to unpack with this narrative, but I think my first question is, why twins? Why use twins and not just a singular character who leaves her hometown and lives as a White woman? Did having a set of twins give you a lot of rich fertile ground to play with, to kind of examine that duality of choices between one who stays and remains herself and one who leaves and becomes someone quite different?

BB: Yeah. I think I knew from the beginning that I wanted to write this book about sisters, and twins became a natural way to explore these questions of identity, the choices that we make, the choices that we could have made. What does your life look like if you made a different choice? I think there's a way in which twins kind of lend themselves naturally to that sort of symbolism. So I didn't want to write about the twins in a way that just felt like they were just metaphors for identity, I wanted them to feel like real people and to feel like they had a real relationship. But to me, one of the questions at the center of the book is just, what makes me me and what makes you you? That's something that I think about as a person who has two older sisters. I think about that in my relationship with my sisters and how different we all are. So having these twins was a way from me to get into that question.

MH: So how did you come up with the character profiles for Stella and Desiree? Because to your point, yes, they are identical, but they're still very much their own people and they make their own decisions.

BB: I knew that I wanted them to be different, and I think that this kind of introvert, extrovert, that's maybe this over simplistic way of looking at them, but that was something that I wanted to think about. One who's a little bit more guarded and a little bit more interior, and one who has a little bit of a bigger personality. So I was drawn to that aspect. I think as far as myself, I think that I am more similar to Stella in personality insofar as being a bit guarded and being a bit quieter of a person. But I liked the idea of them kind of counterpointing each other in that way.

MH: To your point, where you're guarded, do you see this between a public and private self? Because for Stella, she's one way in public.

BB: Right.

MH: For all appearances, she's White, but in private, she's not. So do you see that people have these very distinct public versus private selves?

BB: I think so. To me, the thing that I kept thinking about with Stella, I think figuring out Stella was such an important part of the book for me, because she makes a lot of choices that I could not really conceive of making myself. So as a writer, then your question is, what would draw this person to make this choice? So, for me, I just kept coming back to the idea of like, Stella's core desire is to be safe.

When she passes for White, I don't even think it's so much about opportunism or she wants money, she wants status. I think that those are things that she enjoys when she has them, but I think more than that, she wants the sense of safety that she feels like she cannot have in her life as a Black woman in Louisiana in the 1950s and 1960s. You can understand that desire, this need to protect yourself and this need to find a way to build this sort of thick skin around yourself. I think that that goes to the core of who she is — this very interior person.

MH: Do you think that stems from the incident that she and Desiree witnessed with their father? That it's her reaction to that feeling, if I'm White, these things wouldn't happen to me?

BB: Right. Well, I think I was interested in the idea of these twins witnessing the central moment of trauma that affects both of them very differently. I think part of what affects them is that they are unable to really talk about it or process it, because it is this unexplainably horrible thing that does not have a logical explanation. There is no logic to racist violence. There's no way that you can really make sense of it, let alone as a child. So I was interested in the idea of, yeah, she witnesses this horrible thing that continues to haunt her, even after she's passed as White, a thing she continues to be haunted by. In her mind, she thinks of the ways in which she might be protected from that if she were White.

MH: Got it. So then on the flip side we have Desiree. When she returns to Malheur, she's not alone. She comes back with her eight-year-old daughter, Jude, and returning to a town composed, primarily of "light-skinned Blacks" with a daughter who's immediately labeled a “tar baby”. What was it like to tackle colorism and the intricacies of skin tone in the Black community? It's still a very lightly touched upon subject and people shy away from talking about it. So what was it like tackling that head on in this book?

BB: Well…I wanted to be very deliberate with how I did it, because I think sometimes conversations around colorism, either they turn into pathologizing Black people and sort of like, "Well, how could they treat their own like this?" It's like colorism is an issue that exists beyond the Black community, exists everywhere. It's not something that just emerges organically out of Black communities, it's something that is a result of, obviously, hundreds of years of White supremacy and privileging Whiteness. So I didn't want to pathologize this community. So that was the first thing.

Second, I didn't want colorism to be dealt with as just infighting, or this is what this dark skin character thinks, this is what this... I didn't want it to become that. So I think for me, what I was really interested in was just the embodiment of it and the feeling of it and the feeling of this child, Jude, who has to grow up in this place where there are things being said and also things not being said that she's still able to pick up on. Not only that, the way in which she carries that with her, even after she leaves this place and eventually goes off to college and goes to live in these other different places, it's something that loops in her head as she grows older and she moves on.

I was thinking about conversations I heard about color and growing up as a child and the ways in which I think for a lot of people, those conversations are connected to shame and the shame that people feel of having what has been considered the wrong skin or the wrong body. I was trying to write in the direction or right at that shame, and I think that it's hard to do because it's hard to write shame because I think shame by nature refuses being named. There's something about shame that you can't look directly at, that's the nature of that emotion. So to me, that was a difficult thing to try to figure out how to get at it, but I wanted to get at it in a way that felt embodied and real and not just sociological.

MH: One thing I loved about Desiree when they moved back and she came back with a darker skinned child, she never made Jude feel ashamed of her skin. Like, I remember the scene from her first day of school, she dressed her in this bright, white dress. And her mom's like, "Are you sure about that? Don't you think she should wear something drab like olive... ?" I just felt it was so encouraging to see her as a mother saying, "No, you don't need to hide and try to disguise and try to blend in. You can stand out." I do think, to your point, that does follow with her as she grows up, goes to California and goes to college and whatnot.

BB: I think so. I think Desiree and Jude, I loved their relationship, I loved writing their relationship, because I think that it's very loving, but it also is still sort of fraught. Her mom moves her from DC, where she was much happier to this place that she hates, but it's in order to protect her. But then it also exposes her to this new and different form of violence that she has to endure as she grows up. So it was a fraught relationship, but I particularly loved following it as they got older and began to relate to each other as women and not just mother and daughter.

MH: Sure. But the mother-daughter relationship is a central theme, both in The Mothers and The Vanishing Half. So the setting for The Mothers is your hometown of Oceanside, California. Are there any similarities in The Vanishing Half to your own life or of your own family?

BB: I think very broadly. So my mom is from Louisiana, and that's where the novel opens, and my dad grew up in LA, and that's where a lot of the characters end up. It was around the same time that my dad would have been in college, in college age, around the age of some of the characters that were there. So I think broadly geographically, there was a way in which the novel allowed me to think about these sides of my family coming together. I think my mom and her sister left to Louisiana together to go to California. My mom was one of nine. So they were the only two who left Louisiana, left the South to go out West.

I've always wondered, like, what would my mom's life had been like if she had stayed in Louisiana instead of coming to California? Obviously, she would not have met my dad and I wouldn't be here. But I've always wondered about that. So I think there is a way in which having these twin sisters, one who goes West and one who stays in the South, there's a way in which that allowed me to indulge that thought experiment.

MH: Cool. So for the audio book version of The Vanishing Half, we have the wonderful Shayna Small narrating, and you had Adenrele Ojo narrating The Mothers. They're both fantastic narrators, just wondering, did you have a hand in picking or casting the narrators for either novel?

BB: I didn't. For The Vanishing Half, we did have a conversation about the gender of the person narrating it, and whether we felt like it should be a female narrator or a male narrator. That was something that was interesting for me to sit back and think about, because obviously... Well, maybe not obviously, but when I'm writing it, I don't think about, is the voice of the book gendered in some way? So that was something that we did talk about. Other than that, I deferred to the people who are experts at this type of thing of recording these audio books. So I'm excited to hear it. I haven't gotten a chance to hear it yet.

MH: Okay. Got it. It sounds fantastic. It sounds really good. I'm just curious, why did they propose a male narrator?

BB: I think they just had a couple of really great people.

MH: Okay.

BB: So everybody that they were choosing between was good, and it was like, do you have a preference one way or another? And I was kind of like, "No, it's up to you guys, whoever you think is going to be great."

MH: Okay.

BB: So I think there are voices of lots of different types of people in the book, so I could imagine it going lots of different ways.

MH: Got it. So does having an audio iteration of your work change your relationship to it at all or change how you feel about it?

BB: I don't know about that, but it's always really fascinating to hear somebody else reading it. To hear professionals do it... It's like, when I go to do readings and I'm reading my book, I'm trying my best to be engaging and all those things, but that's not what I'm skilled at doing. So when you hear people who are actually skilled at it, it gives you a new appreciation for that talent. Even I was once in France and I was listening to an actress read my book in French, which I don't understand any French, but I was just like, this sounds incredible to hear this person who's a professional at reading and speaking and performing give this kind of different life to the book.

MH: So knowing that you will have an audio version of your novel, do you think about it orally as you're writing? How it'll sound?

BB: I think I do. Yeah. I always read the book out loud a couple times in its entirety.

MH: Oh wow.

BB: It takes forever, and I always make myself a bit miserable as I'm doing it. There's a way in which when you look at the book on the page and then you hear it, there are things that you hear. If you have pet phrases that you repeat, that your eyes just kind of glaze over when you're reading it, and then you say it out loud and you're like, "Oh, why do I keep saying “just,” or why do I keep saying 'so'?" Or small words like that. So that's helpful. I think also with the dialogue, there'll be moments where I'll write a line and a character is saying the same thing a couple times, and then you don't hear it until you read it back that, Oh, this is really redundant.

So there are moments like that that I'm trying to be more cautious of. I think knowing that there's going to be an audio book and also knowing that I may have to read it out loud at some point in front of people. It's better to do it before than when you're on a stage hearing yourself reduce clumsy sentences.

MH: Sure. Are you a listener of audiobooks?

BB: I am. I haven't listened to many during quarantine, because for me, it's often a like when I'm on the go type of thing. So I loved it when I was on my first book tour, when I would be on planes. I remember I listened to The Lincoln in the Bardo audiobook.

Obviously, very renowned. So yeah, that was a thing that I was listening to on planes or driving when I was living in LA when I'd be driving or something like that. It was mostly an activity for me when I was in motion. So I haven't been listening in quarantine, but hopefully I'll be back in the world outside of my apartment-

MH: Hopefully, outside will open again.

BB: Yes. That's all I would like, is outside to open.

MH: Me too. So, The Vanishing Half joins other literature, including Nella Larsen's Passing, Phillip Roth's The Human Stain, featuring characters who are passing for White. I'll also tell you The Imitation of Life, I don't know if you've heard of it, but I watched that movie religiously as a kid because it was my parents' favorite movie. So I could even quote passages from it. Particularly for Passing and Imitation of Life, those are set in the '20s and '30s. The Vanishing Half is much more contemporary, all the way through the late '80s. Why was it important to set The Vanishing Half in a more contemporary setting to show what passing looks like in a different time?

BB: Well, I have to say first, I also watched Imitation of Life when I was a kid, because I remember my mom and me watched the movie, and for her, it was the climactic scene at the end, the funeral...

MH: Oh yes, the funeral. Yes, oh my goodness.

BB: Yes, the funeral. And my mom was like, "See, that's what happens if you don't treat your mother right."

MH: Yes. 

BB: That was the takeaway.

MH: I had a similar conversation.

BB: Yes. That was what she wanted me to take away from the movie. So that was something that I definitely watched as a kid. It's something that I have been rethinking about a lot as I'm going around to talk about this book. I think I remember when I first started working on it, I told somebody at some book event the gist of what I was working on, and she was like, "You're setting this book way too late. That's not really the heyday of passing in America, that's not where passing literature in America was written or usually set." That's true. Most novels about passing, like Nella Larsen’s Passing novel, most of these movies like Imitation of Life, a lot of these things were happening much earlier in the 20th century.

But I think for me, I was really interested to think about a narrative of passing. Just to open the book in 1968, which is such a pivotal year as far as the Civil Rights Movement, the idea of Black Power Movement, the idea of even eventually creeping towards the age of hip hop. The idea of setting a book about passing within this time was really interesting to me, because it wasn't a story of passing taking place during the heyday of lynching. It's not a story of passing taking place in that moment, it's something happening a bit later.

So yeah, I knew that there was something that was... I don't know if ahistorical is the right word, but maybe counter-historical setting this book about passing later. But it became more interesting to me to see this story of passing and this moment of change that's happening within race relations, that's happening as far as increased integration, that's happening as these narratives of race are changing very dramatically within America. So I liked the idea of setting it at that moment versus at a moment in which it would have been, I guess, more expected.

MH: That's true. So you have a knack for really leaving things unresolved, because I read both The Mothers and I've read The Vanishing Half, lots of unanswered questions, which sort of haunts you as a reader where you're like, "Wow, what happened? Where does she go? What ended up happening?" So without giving away... without spoiling The Vanishing Half, I kept thinking there was going to be some public reckoning for Stella. I just felt like there was this moment that was going to come and it didn't happen. So why do you choose to leave your novels so open-ended in that way?

BB: I'm laughing in part, because after I finished The Mother, I remember my cousin called me and was very riled up. She was like, "But what happens at the end?" So I know that there may be readers who feel that way about The Vanishing Half too, I'm sorry if you are that type of reader in advance. Going back to Imitation of Life, the meaning of that funeral scene is for one, there's the meaning that my mom met me to take from it, which is, look how much this woman regrets disowning her mother, and that's why you shouldn't do that to your parents. But I think there's a second meaning, which is by this White passing woman, flinging her body on her dark skin and mother's casket. She is publicly claiming her and also publicly claiming her Blackness. So there is a return at the end of that story to Blackness, which also doesn't happen in the book. In the book, this character vanishes.

MH: Okay.

BB: So that was a Hollywood ending that we got. I think it's like a satisfying melodramatic move. I think that's the thing that most people remember from that movie, like that's the scene. In both versions of the movie, that scene happens. So that is like a pivotal thing that we remember, but in a way, it almost reaffirms the racial categories that we are born to, because this character is returned to and at the end, versus in the book where she becomes a White woman and just disappears from the story. So she doesn't "get away with it" in the movie in the way that she does in the book. So I think for me, I knew that most stories about passing, I think, have that moment of reckoning. They have a moment where somebody is caught or where they just decide that they're done and they return home. There usually is some moment that returns you to some type of the status quo.

I think for me, I felt like that move can often be sort of moralizing and it can often feel like she's got to get what she deserves for doing this thing, so she needs to be publicly humiliated or she needs to be caught. There's that scene in Imitation of Life where she gets beat up by her boyfriend, who discovers that she's actually Black and he beats her up and leaves her in the alley, and then afterwards her mom is like, "Well, that's what happens when you lie." So there's a feeling of like she got what was coming to her.

I didn't want there to be that moment in the book. I didn't want it to feel Stella needs to be punished for what she's doing, because I didn't want to think about passing as any type of immoral act. I didn't want to think about it as, this is a good thing to do, or this is a bad thing to do, because that's a type of simplistic formula that's not interesting in fiction to me. I don't read to see if characters are good or bad, so I didn't want to go in that direction at all. For me, what was more interesting was how does Stella live with these choices that she's made that are difficult choices and that place all of these strains on her relationship and that change her entire psychology. I was much more interested in how she goes on living in this new life that she has chosen, but that makes her unhappy in a lot of different ways. To me, that was more interesting than seeing her get caught.

MH: Okay. Especially when the neighbors moved in across the street, I was like, could this be it? Like you said, there are no good or bad characters, but I was not pleased with Stella when she so vehemently resisted having the Black family move into their neighborhood. She was leading the charge, she was in the front of the picket line. And then when the family moved in, then she'd be friends, Loretta, the wife, and I just thought that that could have been it, especially the scene where she shows up at the house and Loretta and her friends are having their "book club", which really was just wine time.

BB: Drinking, yes.

MH: Just drinking. And I was like, this group of Black women are going to immediately notice. So then in my mind I just had to imagine like, what does she look like that no one can really tell? That it's not so obvious. I think the thing with Passing that I've found is that... race is this thing where if you present as Black, then you're Black, whereas she's presenting as White, so they have no other reason to think that she's anything than what she's presenting.

BB: I think in those moments between her and Loretta, there's a lot of innuendo in the language that might lead you to believe, oh, Loretta knows.

MH: She could.

BB: At one point, Loretta says, "Tell Stella you're the only one that darkened my doorstep." There are moments like that, where I just enjoy being a little bit coy with how much Loretta might know.

MH: Love it.

BB: And then I also toyed with thinking about if Loretta knows, does she confront Stella and she not? Because I think the other thing that's interesting about these stories of passing is often, there are stories where there are other Black people who recognize the pastor, and there are other stories where other Black people recognize the pastor and choose to protect them. I find that so interesting, because I was thinking about Nella Larsen's Passing, and there's that really uncomfortable scene in the book where... God, I'm forgetting the name of these women, but the White-passing woman, her husband is a raging racist. She invites two of her Black friends who can pass, but don't normally. She invites those two over, and her White husband is espousing all types of N words and just being really horrible, and it's this really uncomfortable and awful scene.

Later, the character who doesn't pass is thinking to herself, like, why didn't I say something? Why didn't I expose her? There's this really weird, complicated thing of the idea that, what is actually loyal in that moment is her protecting her friend who was passing. Not confronting this racist is actually what is loyal to the race, because you are protecting this Black woman who was pretending to be White. So there was this weird logic of it, of the decisions that she has to make or that she chooses to make in that moment that I find really interesting also.

So the idea of, this woman, if Loretta does know that Stella is passing and is choosing to protect her and in a way that actually exposes herself and her family to the harm that they come under, there's something really, I think, complicated and weird about that. So I did want to play with the ambiguity of that moment. I did consider possibilities of this really blowing up, but I knew that I was more interested in what would happen to Stella down the line as she is passing. If she was going to be exposed, it couldn't happen that soon. But I love the idea of her finding this surrogate sister that she is latching onto in her loneliness, in her desperation. But because of the choices that she has made, like you were saying, becoming the face of this White supremacist response in this neighborhood, she creates this impossible situation for herself where she can't have this relationship that she wants to have.

MH: True. I'm not sure if you've heard that Passing is actually being made into a movie with Tessa Thompson, which leads me to my question, which you may be tired of answering. But I heard that Kerry Washington is producing a movie of The Mothers. I'm just wondering if there's any update on that. I know a lot of things are probably stalled now, but just on day.

BB: No, no. No update about that. I wrote a draft of the screenplay, and once it leaves your hands and it goes to the studios, then whatever happens there is completely mysterious and unknown to me. So as far as I know, they're still interested in working on the project, but like you were saying, everything is so up in the air right now with every industry. So we'll see.

MH: Cool. Well, thank you so much, Brit. This was fantastic. I'm so happy that we had a chance to talk, and thank you for your time.

BB: No, thank you.