Oceanside Native Brit Bennett Discusses Her New Novel, 'The Vanishing Half'

Speaker 1: 00:00 A new novel by an Oceanside native reveals through its story, the personal experience of what it's like to be defined by the color of your skin. The vanishing half by New York times bestselling author, Brit Bennett is about twin sisters, Stella and Deseret, who looked so alike that the seamstress who makes their funeral dresses cannot tell them apart. They both go through the trauma of watching their black father die in a lynching by white men, but after they run away from home, they reinvent themselves in totally different ways. Just recently HBO won the right to adapt the story to the screen, joining us as the author of the vanishing half Brett Bennett. Thanks for being with us, Brett. Thanks for having me. So now the timing of the publication of you, because it's interesting with so much focus now, not just on police brutality, but on the racial divide in general, what do you hope we readers take from this story that might help us face that divide? Speaker 2: 00:55 Yeah, I think the timing is surreal and the way that you said, um, I didn't expect that when this book came out, that people would be eager to read her out race, race, racial identity, or racism, and these different ways. So I hope that the book, you know, gives you, uh, a good, uh, reading experience, a nice emotional reading experience, but I also hope that it allows you a new lens of thinking about identity in a way that is maybe a little bit more complicated than the ways that we often think about identities. Speaker 1: 01:22 Now you grew up in Oceanside, but you write really fluently as though you grew up in, uh, st. Landry parish, Louisiana. So how did you get such a good sense of the characters that you write about there? Speaker 2: 01:35 Thanks. Um, I want, my mom is from Louisiana. Um, my dad's from Los Angeles and I grew up in Oceanside, as you said. Um, so I think in a lot of ways I was kind of writing towards my parents in this book. Um, particularly my mom, I was writing in the direction of, of her memories of growing up in rural Louisiana and just her experiences and that the stories that she had shared with me. Speaker 1: 01:54 So talk a bit about the, the underlying premise of the book, the, the enormous effect, the color of your skin has on the choices that you can make and talk about some of the key choices that these twin sisters make that result in the becoming such different people. Speaker 2: 02:09 The look is I think about that, that very question that you just sort of brought up this idea of choice and the ways that we can make sometimes small choices that end up having really large ramifications in our lives. Um, and this book in the case of Stella, she's a character who chooses eventually to live her life as a white woman. And that's a choice that she kind of stumbles into, um, she's mistaken for white and in a moment and she just kind of goes with it. So I was always really interested in the idea of, of racial passing and kind of the implications of that. How does that change you? Has it changed your children or the rest of the family? How does this one choice have huge ramifications for generations to come? Speaker 1: 02:49 So both of these twins have very light skin and that's what gives the book such an interesting premise that they can make choices here and stellar builds completely new life for herself. Now, the idea of, of creating your own, uh, your own identity is linked to the idea of being, you know, a free person, which is at the root of what being an American means, but is something lost. Do you think in choosing to, to deny your heritage like Stella chose to do Speaker 2: 03:16 Well? I think that, you know, a lot of stories about passing often focus on the kind of opportunism of it, the idea of what characters stand to gain by choosing to be somebody else. But for me, what really became interesting about Stella was, was that question of what is she losing by choosing to be somebody else she gains access and power and status and wealth, and a degree of freedom that she did not have previously as, as a black woman growing up in the Jim Crow South. But at the same time, she does lose a sense of, of her own past. You loses her family. She loses a sense of community and identity and culture. And I found that really compelling to think about what she is actually leaving behind and this choice to be a new person. Speaker 1: 03:58 So how do you think that shows will resonate with today's readers? I should make the point that your story takes place in the 1960s and seventies. Right? Right, Speaker 2: 04:07 Right. Um, you know, I think that I wanted to, to write sort of toward the past, but from a 21st century perspective. And for me, what became also really interesting is this idea of what is a story about passing look like if we assume that identity is already something that's fluid, uh, if we assume that you can identify in different types of ways throughout your life, um, that you can see yourself one way that other people can see you a completely different way. Like if we take that fluidity for granted, what does this story really look like? And I think that that's maybe what will make this book feel a little bit different for a contemporary reader than a more traditional, um, or a sort of, uh, a story written in the past, in the way of something like now Larsen's passing or even imitation of life. I think it's different from those stories in that way. Speaker 1: 04:52 Do you think things have changed since the sixties that perhaps the rewards of standing in your black heritage are greater now? Speaker 2: 05:00 I mean, I think things have changed a lot. I, I, you know, I think for Stella she's, I didn't think of her as so much as a character who, who wanted to be white and so far that she wanted kind of the protections that whiteness affords you, that that felt more important. I think to her, this idea that she wants to feel safe and she wants to feel secure. And those are things that she felt like she could only obtain by being white. So I think that now I think of a character like Stella, she would have a different opportunities and different avenues available to her, um, that this character would have had back in the sixties, Speaker 1: 05:32 But it still raises some very relevant questions for today. Um, you know, it relates to anybody who's trying to define themselves, I guess, and you don't make judges about which of the girls made the better choice do you, but is there a message in the book, do you think about the consequences of these choices? Speaker 2: 05:50 I don't, I didn't think of it in that way. Um, I think again, a lot of passing stories often are very moralizing where the character who passes is punished at the end for doing so. And I'm just not interested in moralizing and fiction as a reader or as a writer, really. So I knew that I didn't want to punish Stella and I didn't want to reward Deseret. I didn't want to issue some type of judgment like that. I really was more interested in what the, what the ramifications are of these choices and how it changes these people, um, based on the choices they make, how their lives changed as a result of that. Speaker 1: 06:21 Were you thinking of a particular reader when you wrote this book Brit? Speaker 2: 06:26 Uh, I don't, I don't know that I was, um, but I, you know, I, I think that I, I wanted just to write towards these questions that were interested interesting to me of, you know, the real big question at the center of the book for me is how do we become who we are? And I think that's kind of a universal question. Speaker 1: 06:43 Exactly. Right. That's, that's what struck me was it could relate to anybody struggling to define themselves. And you, so interestingly, take it into the next generation, the daughters of the twins, uh, who somehow carry the trauma of the violence done to their grandfather, even though one of them was never even told about it. Do you think we underestimate the amount of racial trauma that we carry on us regardless of our upbringing? Speaker 2: 07:09 I think so. Um, I think one of the things that I was interested in for, for, for that string of the story, it was kind of this question of generational trauma. Um, and you know, that, you know, they have study, they do studies that show that, you know, genetically, that people who've experienced these degrees of trauma, that their bodies almost changed, like at a cellular level. There's something that changes in them almost physically. And that was always a really interesting idea for me. Um, as a writer to think about how, as, you know, as children, we inherit things from our parents that we may have no way of ever understanding. We may have no context for it, but we still inherit how they were brought up and how they were treated. And there was something to me, so interesting about that gap between how we understand our parents and, and what we actually inherit from them. Speaker 1: 07:54 Hmm. Now, HBO plans to turn this story into a TV serial, how much will you be involved in that? Speaker 2: 08:01 Well, I won't be writing. I will be involved as an executive producer, so I'll be weighing in on the, on the creative decisions. And I'm really excited to see what writers that they bring on board and, and all the creative people who will be involved in bringing it to life. Speaker 1: 08:14 What do you hope that audiences will take away from that? From the onscreen version? Speaker 2: 08:19 You know, I just hope always, I'm hoping that people have a big emotional experience. I love reading and watching things that make me feel something deeply that make me cry. They make me laugh. That makes me think more complexly about some, some topics. So if it allows people to have that big emotional feeling and also think a little bit more deeply about identity than, than I would be really thrilled to see that Speaker 1: 08:41 Well, Brett, good luck. And thanks so much for joining us. Thanks. We've been speaking with Brett Bennett, the author of the vanishing half.