The Vanishing Half

August - The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett

In Brit Bennett’s imagined world, the sisters are raised in the small town of Mallard, Louisiana. A place founded by light-skinned African-Americans and where light-skin is favored with a cult-like obsession. The two girls escape to New Orleans to start a new life for themselves. Stella is seduced by the prospect of becoming white and by her boss, who believes she is white and disappears from her sister’s life. Desiree feels abandoned and moves to DC, where she meets and marries the blackest man she can find.

The story unfolds, and we see the lives they have chosen and the lives they forfeited. The events in the novel parallel what we see in our black and white world and forces us to ask questions that go deeper than race.

If you are one half of a set of twins, do you always feel like a half? Are you sure that you are who you are and not the other twin? Could you have woken up and switched places? Is your twin living your life? Who vanishes? Is it the half of you that was your twin, or was it the half of you that never wanted to go home?

The Vanishing Half follows Desiree and Stella and then their daughters. Stella’s secret creates a trap that she passes down to her daughter, a blond actress that can’t sustain relationships. Desiree’s daughter, Jude, meets and falls in love with a transgender man. Jude never waivers in her commitment to Trace. Watching the fate of the next generation of these divided halves, you wonder if the message is about acceptance, more than about separation and loss.

What, after all, does it mean to pass for white when race is merely a social construct? What does it mean to be a woman, if you are certain, you are meant to be a man? Was Stella passing or just fulfilling her life with a man she fell in love with? Can you help who you fall in love with? And if you learn that the man that you love, started life as a girl, do you no longer love the person? The Vanishing Half seems to ask: What does it mean to be human?

The questions asked in The Vanishing Half are not answered, only posed. But Brit Bennett has us rooting for her characters and wishing we could meet them. Wishing we could heal them. Wishing we could offer a world where being white or black or male or female didn't matter or at least didn't carry so much fear of rejection. Wishing for a world where just being human was to be enough.