By Zaria Whitacre, reporting intern
Brit Bennett, a young best-selling author, drew attendees from Massachusetts to California Friday evening for a virtual event put on by the Chippewa Valley Book Festival.
Bennett discussed her latest book, The Vanishing Half, with UW-Eau Claire Associate Prof. Allyson Loomis, an English department faculty member. The book won the 2020 Goodreads Historical Fiction Award and was a #1 New York Times best seller.
The event was the first of two virtual sessions scheduled by the Book Festival. It will be followed on March 12 by a program featuring Brandon Taylor, author of Real Life. Details about that program can be found at www.cvbookfest.org/festival-events/taylor.
Novel follows twin sisters on different life paths
The Vanishing Half follows the lives of two light-skinned black twin sisters who run away from their home at the age of 16. One goes on to live a life married to a black man and raises a dark-skinned child.
The other sister lives her life passing as white. The novel shows the radically different lives the sisters led, yet how they’re always connected over the course of generations.
Bennett discussed her inspiration for the sisters’ fictional home town from her own mother’s experiences growing up in Louisiana. She said her mother remembered a town where everyone was obsessed with their skin color.
She added that she thought a town built on the toxic ideology of skin color was both disturbing and fascinating, and that it struck her as the basis for a novel.
Decision to pass as white drives the novel
The novel’s driving element was how one sister decided to have a white-passing life because she needed a job, Bennett said. This sister goes on to marry a white man and have a child who considers herself white.
Bennett noted that while this character gains privilege, power, wealth and other tangible things, what she is really seeking is security, because she’s never felt safe and is in constant fear of being discovered as a black woman.
“The irony was fun to explore,” Bennett said. “She has a sense of safety but feels in danger all the time.”
She added that “passing (as white) is an act of self-creation and an act of self-destruction,” and both sisters deal with this in the novel.
Writing can’t come from a place of judgment
Bennett also spoke about not writing from a place of judgment.
“Whether the characters are right or wrong, good or bad, I don’t care about that. I don’t think my writing is good if it comes from a place of judgment,” she said.
She added that her characters may be threatening the power structure of white privilege but she wanted the novel to avoid the trope of punishing those who go against that structure. Bennett said she believed that punishing characters who benefitted from passing as white would give too much validity to existing social structures.
Her final remarks in the portion of the conversation open to audience questions continued to touch on those social structures and her experiences as a writer. In response to a fellow writer’s question about how she strikes a balance between educating white people and the stories she wants to write, Bennett said:
“The attention of white readers is fleeting but we have to keep doing the work and not write to appease an imagined white audience,“ and then added, “I’m going to tell the story I want to tell, write for my community and with my community.”