And you had to kind of shoehorn yourself into one of those spaces. There were white spaces and there were colored spaces.

That was a time in which it was a binary. And I was able to draw on some research from similar Creole communities that were similarly sort of insular and organized around people having light skin. I wanted to kind of explore the idea of a place like this.

I got the idea for the book from a conversation I had with my mother, who told me very offhandedly one day about a town she remembered from her Louisiana childhood, where everyone sort of intermarried so that their children would get lighter with each generation. On the fictional Louisiana town where her story is set during the Jim Crow era Your purchase helps support NPR programming. There's something 'deeply American' about defining your identity, and yet the twin who decides to live as a white woman loses her connection to her past and her family.Ĭlose overlay Buy Featured Book Title The Vanishing Half Author Brit Bennett Passing is 'both an act of self-creation and also an act of self-destruction,' she explains. '1968 is a year that's on everybody's mind right now,' Bennett says, because of parallels between the 1968 protests, and the protests happening today.īennett says that narratives of 'passing' often include a lot of moralizing, but she wasn't interested in telling that sort of story. Racism, brutality and inequality still infect America, 400 years after the first enslaved Africans were brought here. Both are haunted by personal and collective traumas of the past, and the book explores whether it's possible to erase the past, in the name of a better future.įor protesters in cities across the country, the past is the present. One sister lives as a black woman, while the other passes as white. The Vanishing Half is about identical, African American, twins. She is also the author of The Mothers.īrit Bennett's latest novel is set in the late 1960s and '70s and - in the five years she was working on it - she never anticipated that when it came out it would be framed as 'timely.' Brit Bennett says it has been 'surreal' to publish her post-civil rights era book this week.

The vanished half