Welcome to the Service 95 book club with me, Dua Lipa. Honestly, reading has been an anchor through every phase of my life, and this book club is a way of sharing that joy. Every month, I'll spotlight a book I've loved and sit down with the author for an open and honest conversation about the themes, the characters, and the world they've created. And because I've had the pleasure of speaking with so many brilliant writers already, I'll be opening the archive and bringing back one gem each month. So pour a glass, grab your book, and let's get into it. From the Monthly Read Archive, we have Britt Bennett, who I spoke to in November 2023 about her mesmerizing novel The Vanishing Half. We discuss identity and race and how fiction can hold space for contradiction and truth. My chat with Britt coming up. Hi, Britt. Hi, how's it going? Good, thank you. How are you doing? I'm doing great. I'm so happy to talk to you today. I absolutely devoured The Vanishing Hearth, which I read when it first came out in 2020. And I saw it in a bookstore in Los Feliz called Skylight Bookstore. I don't know if you know it. Yeah. And it just, it caught my attention. And when I read it, I just got through it really fast. And I think what I loved about it the most is that it's like this epic multi-generational story with, I guess it was like the pace of a detective story in a way, but at the same time it explores race and gender and wider questions of identity in such like layered and thought-provoking ways and I just um yeah I really really loved it and the book became a New York Times bestseller and put you on the list such as like the Time 100 which I think must have been really surreal and and all by the age of 30 um so I just want to say thank you so much for joining me today and participating in the Service 95 book club. We're just so happy to have you. Thank you. And I'm excited to get into more Vanishing Half stuff. Thank you. So I think you perhaps came to a lot of people's attention in 2014 when you were only 24 years old and you published an article called, I don't know what to do with good white people. was about the killings of Black people by police officers. And your essay went completely viral. It was read by millions in a matter of days. And I suggest to anyone who's listening to this to go and read it, because it's still so, so relevant today. Can you tell me what compelled you to write this piece? And to what extent did this experience set you on the path as a writer? Do you feel like you'd found your voice and found your audience? Yeah. I mean, I think that was the first piece I really published publicly. And yeah, I just remember I was in grad school at the time. I was working on a novel. I never thought of myself as an essayist or anybody who was going to write nonfiction. I thought of myself very squarely as a novelist. But as you said, there was these string of police killings, of unarmed black people that were happening. And also, I think a lot of it was the conversations that was happening with the people around me. I talk about in the essay how I, you know, I've spent a lot of time in white spaces and often with very progressive white people and having these conversations with people who wanted to sort of be absolved of any guilt when these events were happening. There was something about the dissonance between these horrific events that were happening and the reactions of the people around me that were more focused on wanting to seem like, well, I'm one of the good ones. I'm not like those cops. Cool for themselves in a way. Yeah, I think it was a combination of those events that made me kind of sit down and write this essay where I just wanted to interrogate sort of the value of good intentions that if the end result is still harm, how much do your intentions matter? So yeah, it was a very surreal experience. As you said, it was an essay that went viral. I had no expectation when I wrote it that anybody beyond my friends would read it. So it was very surreal and it was my first experience publishing anything publicly. It's fascinating and like I said, it's a really important piece. Now, talking about The Vanishing Half, I think you were writing the novel during the Trump presidency. And I'm wondering whether the renewed political spotlight on race had an influence on you. I mean, when Obama was president, many, especially white Americans, felt like racism was finally on its way to being consigned to history. But then we got Trump and racism was everywhere again but of course it it always had been right um do you think the unfolding events um under trump's presidency were important to how the story evolved yeah i mean i think it definitely was inflected by that moment as you said um it was a book that i started i probably started the vanishing half in like 2017, maybe 2018. So kind of early Trump years is when I first started writing it. But, you know, as you were saying, I think that that was such a particular moment where the racial conversations got very explicit. It was no longer like one of the things I would say about Trump is that he always made the subtext tech There was no sort of I wonder what he means by that Like there was for that feeling like he said pretty explicitly what he meant and his followers also said pretty explicitly what they meant So I do think that that was something that certainly changed as far as conversations about race and what I was thinking about this book. and so much of this book to me is about um sort of defining racial identity and thinking about what it means to be white what it means to be black what it means to choose an identity what it means to have an identity assigned to you uh so i do think that there was something about writing this book in a moment where the conversations about race reached such a fever pitch and things that were maybe subtextual during the obama era became very blatantly text Right. Now hearing you speak, I'm so fascinated by this whole examination of what race is through the different characters in the book. Because it's not as simple as skin colour, is it? You've got a white-skinned woman who is still considered to be Black because of her parentage in the character of Stella, who lives a lie to pass as white and integrate into white society. Then you've got a a dark skin character of Jude, who's Desiree's daughter, who feels isolated by her community in Mallard. So what is race in your view? It's clearly not just about skin color. Is it as much about heritage as well? Or are you saying it's a social construct of some kind? Yeah. I mean, I think that is the big question at the center of the book. And that's why I'm laughing because I spent years thinking about this and I still don't know that I have a concise answer. I think that, as you said, I was interested in the idea of race being beyond skin color, not just you look like this, therefore you are that, which I think was a lot of the ways that I heard people talk about race when I was growing up of, oh, if you look black, you're black, you look white, you're white, that's kind of it. And I think now we have hopefully a more complex understanding of multiracial identity and different aspects of race that are not simply just what you look like. But I think, as you said, also, I think about context and the way that you were raised. And, you know, I'm always like fascinated by people who do like 23andMe, like ancestry stuff, and they find out that their, you know, their racial identity is different than how they believe themselves to be. And does that then change how you think of yourself? Or do you kind of dismiss it because you always threw up believing yourself to belong to whatever culture um you know i think it's so complicated and in this book i wanted to think about that that it's not simply what you look like because at the center of the book are identical twins who look exactly the same but they experience two completely different racial realities because of how they choose to identify yeah it's it's so it's so layered um just the the the stories in the book and everything that's happening, I feel like you intertwine them really well. There's a really shocking and pivotal moment in the novel where the twin girls witness their father being dragged away by white men to be lynched. How does the trauma of their father's murder play out through their life experiences and choices of Desiree and Stella? And even with Jude and Kennedy, their daughters, I guess you could say they experience a kind of intergenerational trauma right yeah i mean i think when i was writing that scene i always titled it the twins split because to me that was really the moment where they kind of split into the different people that they will be even before they actually physically go into their own different directions and to me that was such a pivotal moment because i think that the twins witness this horrific and traumatic thing but they both kind of take these very different conclusions from it um you know i think desiree sees this happen and she thinks to herself that it doesn't really matter how light you are because you can still experience this type of racialized violence so i think that that's a moment where she begins to sort of reject the ethos of the town that believes that it's better to be light light because she saw her dad was very light and this horrible thing still happened to him and I think for Stella her conclusion is almost you know it's not enough to be light you have to be white if you want to escape this type of violence so I think for Stella she almost draws like this opposite conclusion that skin color is um very important and not not just skin color but also how you choose to identify because I think that is a moment that she is haunted by and that sort of begins to I don't know marks the beginning of her desire to escape and her desire to find safety somewhere outside of this town. Do you think there's like, um, I don't know, a feeling of betrayal in some way by Stella choosing to leave, like, Mallard and go on to live in a new identity? I definitely think so. I think, you know, Mallard to me was an interesting place because it's a town where people very much value being light, But the idea of leaving it to be white, that's something else, you know, so it was good to be light there. But if you decided to fully leave the community and fully exit and to live as white, that is sort of another transgression in this community. and there are people, there are characters that you're like told about who kind of will pass momentarily like, you know, oh, I wanted to sit at this restaurant. So I'll be white right now. But the idea of passing permanently, which is what Sela does, that is something that is sort of this very high betrayal of this community. So I found it so interesting that they have to like thread this needle very carefully between you want to be light. So you don't want to be like other black people, but you also don't want to be white. So you have to just thread this impossible needle the entire time. I want to say that I really loved the tenderness in the book between Jude and Rhys. And for me, I guess one of the most moving things in the whole novel is how they find forms of acceptance and love and support in each other that they hadn't felt elsewhere. I think it's just a really beautiful way to explore the issue of identity from a different lens. The way I read it, it seemed that Rhys and his trans journey just starts to become even closer to his true self, whereas Stella feels like she's getting more and more distant and lonely as the novel goes on. And I'm wondering, what were the issues that you were looking to discover regarding identity between these two parallels, I guess? Yeah, I mean, I think that the way that you read it was definitely the way that I thought of it as well. I didn't want to conflate those two experiences and say that they were exactly the same. But at the same time, I thought that they echoed and they sort of bounced off of each other in a really interesting way as far as Reese experiencing this extreme violence when he's growing up and undergoing having to have this courage in order to live and be his true self and finding community and acceptance as he does that versus, as you said, Stella deciding to leave her community but not finding acceptance. she ends up emerging in this completely isolated life. So to me, those were huge differences in the way that they experienced these changes. But I also, I love the idea of Reese as a character because I think he complicates Jude's understanding where she, you know, Jude is a character who wants to change a lot of things about herself but is not able to. And I think that she always sort of resents somebody like Stella for being able to change her life in this really dramatic way. But I think when she meets Rhys, that really complicates her understanding of what it means to sort of become a different person. Because as you said, Rhys is a character who undergoes a lot of physical changes, but at the end of the day, he becomes closer to himself. To himself, yeah. Yeah, and like Stella doesn't even really change her name. Like she doesn't undergo these different physical changes, but she turns into a completely different person than the character you meet in the beginning. Hmm. Let's talk about the men in the book. um Desiree and Stella's men like how do Sam Winston early Jones and Blake Saunders differ like do they have any traits in common yeah that's it now I'm like imagining the three of them being in a room together that's very stressful um I guess as far as like I'll start with uh Desiree's people I suppose but yeah I mean Desiree her you know her husband um she's escaping from him in the beginning of the book because he's horribly abusive to her. And to me, that was an interesting relationship because she, I think in a way, is sort of rebelling against her upbringing, against her family by marrying this man that she knows her mother would disapprove of. And he does end up being awful to her, but she doesn't really want to admit it. So she sort of slinks home, not wanting to admit that her mother was right about him, even though the reasons why her mother was right were not. It wasn't like she knew he was going to be abusive. She was just being awful to him, but she happened to be right. And Early Jones is this character from her childhood who she reconnects with. And you described the books in the beginning as sort of feeling like a detective story. Early is kind of our detective character. And he's a character that I had so much fun writing because, I don't know, it's like, I guess, cliched in a way. But I love a sort of gruff person who also is very tender. and I think that's very much early where he doesn't say much and he's not very effusive with his emotions but he shows through his actions that he really cares and he's loving and protective towards Desiree and then eventually Jude. And then for Stella's husband, Blake, he's this character who kind of sweeps her off her feet. He sort of is this guy who seems like he's going to give her everything that she's ever wanted. He's got money. He's got this nice job. But to me, what was so fascinating about that relationship was just how little they really know each other versus Desiree and Earley where you're like, these people are connected. They really talk. The idea of being Stella, what is it to be married to somebody that you have to hide past from? You can't talk about the things that you've experienced. You can't really be your true self around the person that you share a life with. So that relationship for me was so stressful and thinking about what it would be like to be in a marriage like that. It's such a big sacrifice for her to go and do something like that, to give up everything that she knows and who she is. It's really interesting. Class is also a central theme in the novel. And for me, one of the novel's greatest strengths is that it shows that race isn't a single category. Like, I think we see some of the most interesting interesting character developments when race intersects with class. Like for example, we have Adele, Desiree and Stella's mother. She rejects Early Jones who's from a sharecropper background despite how good he is to her over many, many years. And he's also such a big contrast to Desiree's abusive husband, Sam, who was a higher class lawyer. What would you like readers to take away about class? And is it sometimes too easily overlooked Yeah I mean I think that as you when when these different categories intersect it gets really interesting for me as a writer when it race and gender or racial class or whatever um and in this case i was interested in these different characters i think i think in part because also clash is a category that we move through with more fluidity than perhaps the others. Like it's, I think it's more familiar for people in a way to think about moving between class categories and perhaps races, ascenders or something else. And the ways that people respond to you and the ways that you think about yourself and the facet, you know, for someone like Stella, for example, I think that's one of the biggest changes for her. It's not just being living as white, but it's also living as upper class. So she has to like learn what to do and how to speak and how to eat and what things you're, you know, what type of taste you can have. I think that that's one of the biggest things that you carry with you is your class background, even if you move between those categories. So yeah, I mean, I think I wanted to sort of complicate that and not just have this very simple story of these women marry these rich guys and everything is amazing. I wanted to, you know, complicate that. But I think when thinking about Adele and Early, yeah, there is a way that she looks down on him, not only because he has dark skin, but also because it's four, in spite of the fact that he is a good man. You've done such an interesting and brilliant job of being able to, how do you even do something like that when there's so many intertwining stories happening when you first start out, you know, to write a book? Yeah. Do you just have it all on a board and you just kind of plan where you're going next? And how does that even, how do you even form something? I wish. You know, it's so like that. Well, I wish I was that organized and strategic. It really is just kind of following where the story takes you, figuring out what's interesting. I mean, for me, I think my life would be easier if I was outlining and planning and if I was more deliberate about it. But I think for this book, I knew I wanted to start with the twins. I knew vaguely, you know, I knew they were going to split up. I kind of knew where each of them would be. But these other characters, you know, that kind of wandered into the book, it really felt like it was just discovering what felt fun and interesting. And then a lot of editing to try to make it all make sense. Amazing. Amazing. I mean, The Vanishing Half has had, I mean, has clearly had a phenomenal impact. You know, you've been at the top of the New York Times bestseller list. you've won numerous awards um has it also had the impact that you hoped on readers i mean i i don't i i don't know i think that i when i set out to write this book i wanted to first tell a great story i wanted to entertain people i wanted to you know there's so many things that you can do now besides read a book it's like you could be watching a movie you could be listening to podcasts you playing a video game like you could be doing a million things with your time so i think being able to write something that will make somebody turn away from all of those other things in order to focus and read the book. That's always the first thing I'm thinking about. But I think the second thing was that I did want to ask these questions about identity and about race and choice and history and family. I wanted to ask those big questions and maybe not provide answers to them. But I felt like it would be successful if I led people to think about those things a little bit further. And I think when I had conversations with readers and particularly all over the world i think that's been one really fascinating thing because it is a very like specifically american book of like taking place in a very specific american context and but i've talked to readers in poland i've talked to readers in you know south africa i've talked to readers in lots of different places that have different racial context and people have connected to the story they've been interested in it they wanted to know more about like the history of race in America and the weird like specific and particularities to it that inflect the book. So I think it's been really exciting to talk to readers and see how they've connected to it first just as a story and then second wanting to know more or thinking more about some of the themes and the sort of historical questions that I was wanting to explore. Amazing. Well, Britt, thank you so, so much for this today. I have absolutely loved talking to you and diving in a little bit deeper and hearing you talk about the Varnishing Half. So thank you so much for your time. And well, I guess for me, like what I want to know is what's next? Like, are you working on anything new? I am actually. I'm working on another novel. It's actually about music. Okay. And yeah, so we'll send you an early copy whenever it's done. I would love that. Yeah, it's been a bit of a journey. I've been working on this book for a while, but I just wanted to write a book about two female musicians who have very complicated and fraught relationships. So it's been fun. it's been fun to write about something that I think is more enjoyable than thinking about, you know, the history of racial violence and some of the themes of the band that she has, like, it's been fun to, to write into something that I love. And yes, I'm hoping it'll be done at some point, but definitely say it's a new family. I have it. Amazing. Well, I'll keep, I'll keep my eyes open for that. That's very exciting. And thank you again so much. And have a lovely rest of your sunny day in New York. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks for having me. All right. Thank you. Thanks for listening. Don't forget, there are brand new episodes added every month alongside these archive episodes. We've got some amazing authors coming up that I just know you'll love. Make sure you're following the Service 95 Book Club podcast so you never miss an episode. And if you love this one, why not leave us a review? Thanks so much for listening and see you next time. you
