Brit Bennett, THE VANISHING HALF

[1:50]Zibby Owens: Hi. I'm Zippy Owens, and you're listening to moms don't have time to read books. This thirty minute podcast features a new author interviewed by me every single day, three hundred and sixty five days a year for about thirty minutes. Am also the publisher for Zippy Books, which publishes 12 books a year in fiction and memoir. Our books are already out now. You can check it out on zippybooks.com. And we have a magazine called Zippy Mag where we have lots of wonderful essays and lifestyle features. That's at zippymag.com. We have classes at zippyclasses.com. And I recently opened a bookstore in LA called Zippy's Bookshop at 1113 Montana Avenue at 11th Street in Santa Monica. I hope that you are able to enjoy some of our other offerings. But this here podcast is the basis of all of it and started in 2018. And no matter what I do, this is basically my favorite thing. Enjoy. I am re releasing my episode with Britt Bennett, wrote The Vanishing Half, because if there's anyone out there who has not read The Vanishing Half, just because it didn't come out this summer doesn't mean you shouldn't read it. It's a really great book, and I enjoyed my conversation with Britt about it immensely. This interview that I did with Britt Bennett is from an event with Penn America. They host virtual authors nights, authors dinners that used to be. And I attended a bunch of them myself before saying, you know what? I would love to just get in there and interview one of these people. So I offered and said, is there any chance I could interview Britt Bennett? And they said yes. And I was so thrilled. And then I read the entire book basically in two sittings over the course of a weekend. Could not put it down. Was so good. Sometimes when there's a lot of hype around a book, I'm reluctant to read it because I know I'll be disappointed. This was not the case. This book is seriously really great. The story itself is really great and the writing. So a little bit about Britt. She was born and raised in Southern California. She graduated from Stanford University and later earned her MFA in fiction at the University of Michigan where she won a Hopwood Award in graduate short fiction. In 2014, she received the Hurston Wright award for college writers. She is a National Book Foundation 535 honoree, and her debut novel, The Mothers, was a New York Times bestseller. Her second novel, The Vanishing Half, was an instant number one New York Times best seller. Her essays have been featured in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review, and Jezebel. And by the way, there was a big I think 17 different production companies were bidding to turn The Vanishing Half into a limited series on HBO one. So I'm sure we'll be hearing a lot more about that. And if you wanna check out Penn's events, you definitely should. Pennamerica.org, and they have lots of events all the time that are all for a great cause to help free speech throughout the world. So go check them out too. Thank you so much for having me here tonight. This is such a thrill. And, Britt, I am so excited to be interviewing you tonight. So just bear with my glee as I ask you questions. Sure. Thank you. Thanks for being here. Oh my gosh. I snooped on you earlier today doing your Instagram live with Shondaland to get a little preview of what's been on your mind. So thanks for that today too. I read about how you had asked your mother Your mother had told you about this small town, which really was the inspiration for this book. But maybe you could share that story with everybody here and go into more how you took that germ of an idea and translated it into what became the one of the most sensational novels I've really read in my entire life. Thank you. And thank you for having me tonight. Thank you everyone for watching. Yeah. I honestly don't really remember the context of the conversation I was even having with my mother, but I just remember her very offhandedly

[5:34]Brit Bennett: mentioning this town that she remembered from her childhood where everyone was so obsessed with skin color that they just kind of married within the community in hopes that their children would get lighter from generation to generation. And she said it to me very offhandedly, like it was something that everyone just kind of knows. And it immediately struck me. Think all I remember is just being like, wait, slow down, slow down. Let's go back to that thing that you just said. That's crazy. And it immediately struck me. I just wrote it down in my, you know, my phone. I have it in my, like my notes when I just jot it down that basic idea. And then, and then at the time I was still kind of finishing up The Mother, so I didn't really go back to it right away. But it immediately struck me as something that was potentially the setting for a novel. It was an idea of a town that's oriented around this really troubling idea. And I think when you're thinking about a novel, the idea of having something that immediately presents itself as a problem, like immediately this town presented itself to me as a problem. And from there, I thought about, well, what would it be like to be a light skinned person in this town that has this really horrific ideology? And what would it be like to be a dark skinned person in this town? And that was kind of the basis of the idea of these twin sisters whose lives take them in very different directions. So it's one thing to have a little note in your phone and start

[6:49]Zibby Owens: noodling on a concept, but it's another to then blow it out into all these different interwoven stories across timelines and all the rest. So what happened between the idea and, like, now? Like, how did you how did you craft it to become what it was in terms of process? And did you outline it? Like, how did you get it from there to here?

[7:13]Brit Bennett: I mean, I, you know, I talk about it as if this was like a straightforward journey and of course it totally wasn't. I don't really outline, but I know that it took me, you know, many, many drafts and many years of trying to figure it out. I knew immediately that I was interested in these twin sisters, one who you see at the beginning of the book when she has returned to this town with her dark skinned child, and the other one who's kind of vanished off into the wind and you don't know what happened to her. So I knew that that was the opening of the book. And from there, it was a lot of just kind of trying different things out. I didn't realize originally that I was interested in the lives of the twin sisters' children. I thought I would just I thought originally it would just be like one half of the book would be one sister and the other half of the book would be another sister and that would be really nice and neat. But then I realized I was really interested in their children. I was interested in the men in their lives. I was interested in all these other sort of minor characters that really just kind of gripped me because of their own stories about reinvention and transformation that really appealed to me. So it took a lot of trial and error to try to weave all of those stories in a way that was even coherent, let alone hopefully moving and interesting to the reader. Did you use flashcards?

[8:24]Zibby Owens: Like, I mean, paint me a picture here. I have to know how you did it because it looks so it looks so seamless when you read it. But of course, it's not when you do it. So did you keep it all in your head? Were you cutting and pasting like crazy?

[8:38]Brit Bennett: Eventually there were some flashcards, but as far as like the kind of beat by beat of it, honestly, that was, again, it was trial and error because at first I thought, well, you know, are you going to see, is the first chapter Desiree and then immediately you see Stella, am I going to delay when you see Stella? That became something I was trying to modulate. And then as far as the daughters originally, I originally thought the book was going to be chronological, you know, I thought, oh, I'm just going to be moving through time. And then it, there was always something to me that didn't feel it felt disjointed the lives of these women. It didn't feel like they existed in the same timeline, really. So then once I realized that that kind of freed me to play around with that timeline and make some other sort of bigger imagine of leaps. So yeah, mean, took, there was not a streamlined process at all. There was a lot of frustration, a lot of banging my head against the wall. And fortunately, a lot of really great help from my editor who was just in the trenches with me the whole time trying to help me figure this thing out. Wow. Your your editor then deserves some sort of medal or something. I don't know.

[9:39]Zibby Owens: You know, one thing I was struck by in the beginning was how all the characters had left home, like in a pretty dramatic way. Desiree and Stella both left. Jude, that when you go through generations, Jude eventually leaves and Kennedy eventually leaves and Reese has left his family and Early has left his family. And they do so in part to find themselves, but also just to escape, right, and begin again. So I was wondering sort of why you incorporated that theme and what did you yourself ever leave behind that might have amplified this message in your personal life? Yeah. I have never had as dramatic departure as all those characters that you just described.

[10:18]Brit Bennett: All of my leavings have just been, you know, going somewhere for school or just wanting to move or wanting to do something new. But I think I've always been drawn to that idea of leaving home is something that's, I mean, I think it's inherently pretty interesting. But I also do associate it so much with change. I think that it can be really hard to change who you are when you're around the same people who have always known you to be one certain way versus once you've got, get a little bit of distance, and then you can kind of try out different people and you can sort of play around with who you are in a little bit of a different way. So I think all of these characters experience that similarly, you know, when Stella is growing up in this town, she kind of dabbles with passing, you know, she's tried it before, but it's not something she can really get away with because, you know, she still lives at her mother's house. Like she can't truly commit to this life as a white woman in a way that she finds herself. She kind of starts to ease into it more once she and her sister go to New Orleans. She can kind of ease more into that life, but then fully commits once she has left her sister behind. But I think that's true of a lot of these characters that once they gain that physical separation, you can make that kind of mental and emotional separation that is required in order to become a different person or to become the person that you wanna be. So is there a piece of yourself that you wanted to change and like reinvent in a new place? Or is there half of yourself you would like to have vanished? I don't know about that, but I do know that, you know, I think in writing this book, I kept thinking about my relationship with my family, which is very close. But at the same time, I think sometimes that closeness can feel sort of claustrophobic. You can feel sometimes kind of trapped into the person, you know. For example, I'm the youngest child in my family, you know? So there is a sense of always kind of being the baby when you're at home, which can be nice sometimes in ways and other times can be a little bit frustrating. So I think there are things like that of having these roles that you can be, you know, hemmed into. And I'm talking about this in a very kind of, you know, very sort of low stakes way. I think the stakes for all these characters are so much higher of the types of roles that they're trapped into and the ways in which they're trying to break free from them.

[12:31]Zibby Owens: And the way that they transform is so dramatic, right? Everything that you would think is static becomes fluid from race to gender, to names. I mean, everything is like in flux constantly in this book. And I think that's what's so unique because you never know who you're getting to know as they get to know themselves. So I wondered if you could just talk a little more about that sense of fluidity that nothing is stable except perhaps love.

[13:00]Brit Bennett: Yeah. I mean, I think that that was one of the things that really drew me into writing this book. I knew I wanted to write this story that was going to be about passing, but I wanted to write into this kind of literature of passing from my perspective as a twenty first century writer. And from my perspective, I think sometimes the sort of most famous passing literature, it kind of essentializes identity in this way. You know, it almost sometimes there's something kind of inherently contradictory about those stories because you have a character who's moving one from one category to another, which kind of destabilizes those categories. But at the same time, there's often a way in which, you know, if they are, you know, exposed, it's because, you know, somebody senses that you are black, they like sense an essentialized blackness within you that you cannot rid yourself of. And that is what makes you black because there's something essentially black inside you. Like there are those types of, you know, those types of kind of understandings of race. So there are ways in which I think a lot of passing stories can actually be, they can be sort of transgressive in one way, but also sort of this kind of very regressive way of thinking about identity where identity essentially fixed within you. And I think for myself, I wanted to write against that. You know, I wanted to write against that idea that there's anything essential about these identities. The idea that there's anything stable about them or that there's anything even clear. You know, like Stella's experience of passing when she finally sort of commits to it is that she goes in to get a job and somebody mistakens her for white and she just goes with it. And there's something so absurd about that because she walked into this office building as a black woman and she left as a white woman. And how is that a possible, you know, how's that possible? But it is. So there was always something to me very, I think absurd is like one of the words that I was thinking about this about these identity categories, because again, they determine so much about our lives. So the fact that whether Stella is black or white determines whether she can get this job or not, but she becomes white because somebody believes her to be white and she just says, yeah, I am. What does that mean that her racial identity determines this like very real fact of can she pay her rent and can she feed herself? But at the same time, it's so flimsy that she can just easily slip into one category, you know? So to me, was that contradiction in between those two things of the very real implications of all of those categories of race or gender, but also just the flimsiness between them and the ways in which they are permeable, in ways that we may not easily assume, but in ways that at least I believe to be true. Today's episode is sponsored by Quince.

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[18:22]Zibby Owens: So you must be asked all these questions about identity and all this stuff all the time. Like, this must be your I mean, like your bread and butter. You must talk about this forever. Does it make you turn a lens like onto yourself to think like, how do I feel about my own identity? Like how important is your race, your gender, your sexuality, like to you as an author and to you as a person? And how did that play into the writing? Is it that you want all that to be fluid? Is it that it's so central to your core of your soul? Like tell me about your relationship to your own

[18:57]Brit Bennett: identity. I mean, that's a really huge question. But, you know, I think it's like, you know, again, it's, I guess it's fluid. It's something that's sort of that I don't have like an easy answer towards. Because I think there's a lot of ways within this book, was thinking about ways in which identity and labeling identity can be really important for community formation. You know, for example, when Jude arrives in LA, she becomes friends with a group of drag queens and who have all found community with each other and kind of welcome her into this community. And that's a space that, that I think, you know, there are ways in which forming those types of spaces around identity can be really lifesaving, you know, and really important. But on the flip side, there are also ways in which labels for certain types of identities can be restrictive and that they can feel like they box you in in some way. So I was thinking about that, I think, a lot for the book too, that kind of moving between ways in which any type of labeling can be really liberating and also ways in which it can make you feel trapped when these characters kind of move in between in a lot of those different ways. So I think, I think in a lot of ways writing the book has, has caused me, I think to, I think more than anything has caused me to take a step back when I am, I mean, one, I think when I'm speaking, because one of the things that I thought about in this book is the way in which identity is so much more complicated than our language allows. So a good example of that is just Stella's daughter. You know, I still have not really decided a way to racially identify her. I don't really know what is the accurate way to describe this person who is a daughter of a Black, white passing mother and has a white father and believes herself to be white, but later decides, you know, like, I don't have, there's not like a succinct way to describe her. So I think part of it is maybe take a step back and be critical of the language that I use in thinking about identity and also in the ways in which I make snap judgments about other people's identities. Because part of the book is that you just have no way of knowing. Identities are not as clear as we believe them to be. I think that it's true for people too. Right? You don't know the core of people's identity on the surface. You don't know what people are going through on the surface. You could pass by them on the street. It's like how the drag queens who you referenced, like literally could be somebody completely different. Or you could just be going through something really challenging and you just might not know. It's almost like

[21:19]Zibby Owens: shining an x-ray machine onto everybody. And what would that do to society if we all could actually see inside what was really going on? Maybe everything would be a little better, I hope. I don't know. Maybe. Maybe. Or much worse. I don't know. Maybe some people want to see inside. Yeah, pretty much. In terms of going back to your craft a little bit, because even what you were saying with language, like the way that you were able to tap into different ways of speaking based on all the different characters and just even in so few words, like paint such a picture of what was going on and what someone's personality was like. And then how you had all these cliffhangers. Like, think the scene where the, you know, where the wine bottle drops is like, that's going to be like a Jeopardy question in like fifty years. Like what's the best seat and biggest cliffhanger? In terms of things like that, did you pick those up in your MFA program? Voice and language and I know we already talked about structure, but cliffhangers and building that suspense because that's something in this book that was just so it's so like propulsive not to use an overused word, but, you know. Yeah. I mean, I don't know.

[22:27]Brit Bennett: I think for this book, you know, when I start to realize the structure of it was going to be kind of these pieces, that it wasn't necessarily this one continuous narrative that you were going to have these kind of starts and stops. Then I did become interested in the idea of those types of cliffhangers. And I think for that section in particular, you know, that's dead center of the book. So thinking about that middle point of the book or the movie or whatever you're looking at is usually when something big happens. So the idea of that being the moment where the stories start to converge and I just something about the bright or the dark red wine on that white carpet was really memorable to me at least when I was thinking about this moment that would convey the shock that this character is experiencing. So I think I thought about it in that way. But I think in general, thinking about the suspense, you know, I think, I think of this kind of as a fake mystery story because the mystery is not really where Stella, that's kind of what feels like the mystery at first maybe is we've got to find Stella, where did she go? But I tell you where she went. That's not really the journey. The journey is more like what has become of Stella or where Stella in a kind of more existential way of what happened to Stella? That's more, I think, the kind of the question pulling you through. So I think for me, I think for both of my books, I think the thing that I did take away from my MFA program was this idea of creating suspense by revealing information instead and of withholding it. So for me in this, in The Vanishing Half from like the opening section, tell you, you know, this is Desiree, this is Stella, this is kind of what happened to Desiree, this is kind of what happened to Stella, and here is the setup for the whole town. Because I didn't want the question reading the book to just be, well, what happened to Stella? Like, I just wanted to tell you right away, she's living as a white woman somewhere, and we're going to kind of go on after I've given you that information.

[24:18]Zibby Owens: And so what has this been like for you? I know you already had a New York Times bestseller with The Mothers, which I have to go back and read. Now I'm so excited to have a new thing on my shelf that I like can't wait to get into. But you've had such success. I mean, this was like such a blowout hit during such a crazy time of the world. And you must, like your life must be somewhat different even if you're in the exact same place, right? Like how does it feel to you like to have had all this happen? Like you're only 30 or something like that? That's crazy. So what does it feel like that you've been on set on this trajectory and have like 17 studios like bidding over your movie rights and

[24:57]Brit Bennett: it's just nuts and having so like, what does it feel like to you? I mean, I think exactly what you just described, you know, I think it's been, you know, weirdest year of anybody's life and certainly been the weirdest year of my life. And I think for me, it was just very strange to kind of swing between these poles of being really excited about things happening with the book, being really horrified by everything else. And also, think the weirdness of experiencing all of this in isolation has been really strange. Just, you know, the talking for the, you know, the TV rights for the book and having these really intense Hollywood conversations and just being by myself in my apartment, just kind of dealing with all of it. So it's been a weird feeling of feeling both really exposed, but also very alone and also really excited about the book and also really devastated by everything else happening in the world. But it's been kind of a weird year of swinging between those poles.

[25:49]Zibby Owens: So do you have some amazing work of fiction that's going to come out of this time of these

[25:56]Brit Bennett: vacillation between the two poles? I mean, I don't know how amazing it will be, but I've been writing because again, I'm by myself. So I'm like, what else am I? Like when, when I was, you know, sort of earlier in the lockdown, I just had, you know, eventually my, I was teaching a class, the class was on Zoom, and then eventually the class ended in like May. So I just had this like, you know, five, you know, I don't know, five weeks or whatever in between when the class ended and when the book came out. And I just was basically just working on this next book because I had so much like anxiety about what was going to happen with The Bandaged Account, and I'm publishing in a pandemic, and is anyone going to care? And then all of the other just normal anxiety of being in New York at the time. So I've been able to, I think, try to pour some of my energy into working on something else. And I think it's been really great to be able to start a new project and think about a whole different new fictional world and give me at least some place to put all of my energy that is just being contained in my apartment right now. And can you tell us any more about that book? It's still very early, but it's about music. It's about singers who have a lifelong feud. So it's really different project for me, but one that I've been really excited about. Wow. Did you have an eye to make this into something cinematic when you were writing The Vanishing I don't I mean, I think that you're always influenced by watching TV or films or these other things. I'm sure those elements kind of creep in as you're writing. But I never thought I don't think about casting it or anything like that. I never think that far about anything. So I don't think about it, but I'm I am excited to see what the adaptation will look like. And have you been able to see your family or friends, like, at all? Or have you even, like, have you been walled off completely this whole time? Yeah. I went I got to go back to California for the summer, so I saw my family. And been able to see friends at the park and everything while the weather is still nice. So hoping that we'll hold out for a few more weeks of nice weather before we all retreat into our winters of solitude. Yes, exactly. Do you have any advice to aspiring authors? I think my advice is very basic advice, which is just read everything. I think you've learned from things that you like and also from things that you hate. So I think reading widely and that's not to say read everything like you have to read everything that's ever been written. That's just to say read widely. So I think, I think that's one of my pieces of advice and just be patient with yourself because the work will be bad for far longer than it will ever be good. If it, that's like if you ever feel that your work is good, which I think most writers I know never feel that way. So you have to just learn how to be patient with yourself and trust that that's part of the process is kind of hating your work. The difference is, I think being able just to stick through it and to believe that you can make it better throughout

[28:39]Zibby Owens: all of the challenges of wrestling with the work. And what type of books do you like? Like what are some of your biggest influences and what do you like to read sort of even when you're tired?

[28:48]Brit Bennett: Yeah, I mean, things. I've been kind of doing sort of a slow reader, but I've been doing balancing a lot more nonfiction and fiction these days. I've read a lot of biographies because of the new book. So lots of music biographies that I've been reading. Also, you know, love journalism fiction. I loved, I think the book that I've read recently that I loved the most was Feast Your Eyes by Myla Goldberg, which came out last year. It's the structure of the book is like an art catalog where she is describing photographs, but you don't actually see the pictures as you're reading the book. You're just reading descriptions of them. So I love that. I've been thinking lot about how do you write about art that the reader does not get to actually experience because of writing about music that doesn't exist.

[29:30]Zibby Owens: So it was really cool to see how somebody is doing that with describing pictures that you never get to see. Very cool. Well, thank you. I know everybody else is gonna have a lot of questions, so I don't wanna monopolize you. But thanks for letting me probe into your inner psyche for a few minutes and find out more of the backstory. So thanks. Thanks. Thanks for listening to this episode of Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books. Don't forget to follow me on Instagram

[30:01]Zibby Owens: and sign up for my virtual book club and meet lots of authors on Zoom every other week. Thanks so much to Steve and Ryan at Texture Sound for the sound editing, and thank you to Morning Moon Productions for providing this fantastic intro and outro music.