When the novelist Brit Bennett moved to New York City last year to teach writing classes, she didn’t anticipate that she would eventually get a front-row seat to the type of social change she has contemplated in her writing. From the Brooklyn apartment where she has weathered the pandemic, she has also watched a protest movement bloom, and has even joined the marchers.
“It was cool to see people hanging out their windows and yelling out support, cars honking, and people watching everything. People watching the protest walk by, people supporting and clapping,” Bennett said this week, a few days after the release of her new novel, The Vanishing Half. “Particularly coming off this extreme period of isolation that a lot of us have been experiencing. A month ago the idea of being in a crowd would be so unthinkable. But right now it feels so urgent. It feels healing.”
In 2014, as the Black Lives Matter movement gained momentum in the aftermath of Michael Brown’s death in Ferguson, Missouri, Bennett wrote an essay called “I Don’t Know What to Do With Good White People.” In it, she tells a story about the difficulty of being Black in the presence of white people who claim they want to help, but persist in racist behavior. In the years since, her essay occasionally recirculates alongside new instances of police brutality, which frustrates Bennett, though she appreciates the impact the essay has had on its readers. “There’s that feeling, like we’re stuck in this endless loop of Black death and outrage. And then there’s some type of words about unity, and then we’re back in the loop again,” she said. “In another sense, it feels like this is a different moment.”
In her fiction, she’s explored how young people of color adapt to a world that doesn’t accept them or allow them to flourish. Her acclaimed 2016 novel, The Mothers, documented a small Black community centered around a church in Southern California. Around the same time that she was writing about Ferguson, Bennett began writing a book that would broaden the scope. In The Vanishing Half, she follows a set of twins after they leave their small, mainly Black hometown in Louisiana. One, Desiree, eventually returns and finds her life hemmed in by discrimination and circumstance. The other, Stella, reinvents herself as a white woman and spends decades in an upper-middle-class California community, where she is forced to hide her secret. By tracing Stella and Desiree’s diverging paths, and the way their daughters are affected, the novel maps the lines drawn between white and Black people and dramatically exposes the emotional stakes of identity.
Vanity Fair caught up with Bennett by phone, where she talked about her motivations for writing about passing, her thoughts on understanding history through narrative, and her hopes for change going forward.
Vanity Fair: Your new book starts in 1968, partially because of the historical significance of the year, when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, the hope of the civil rights movement began to foundered, and urban violence was widespread. Did you anticipate that the book might emerge into circumstances when people are discussing 1968 again?
Brit Bennett: It’s not something I imagined when I started this book in 2014, that it would be framed as being topical in some way. I was interested in thinking about the unrest in the wake of Dr. King’s assassination, and the way in which these two twin sisters react to it very differently. Desiree seizes the chaos of the moment to escape this bad marriage and that restarts her life in one way. For Stella, who has been passing as a white woman and living in this white neighborhood, she’s grieving in this moment and feeling the pain and anger. But she still finds herself reinforcing segregation in her neighborhood, because she doesn’t want a Black family to move in and expose her for being Black. I was interested in that historical moment pivoting the characters, and the way in which they are experiencing these emotional crises in addition to these historical crises.