Spanning nearly half a century, from the 1940s to the 1990s, the novel focuses on twin sisters, Desiree and Stella Vignes, who were raised in Mallard, Louisiana, a (fictional) small town conceived of by their great-great-great grandfather - after being freed by the father who once owned him - as an exclusive place for light-skinned blacks like him. It's also a great read that will transport you out of your current circumstances, whatever they are. It's an even better book, more expansive yet also deeper, a multi-generational family saga that tackles prickly issues of racial identity and bigotry and conveys the corrosive effects of secrets and dissembling. Four years later, her second, The Vanishing Half, more than lives up to her early promise. How?īrit Bennett's first novel, The Mothers, was the sort of smashingly successful debut that can make but also possibly break a young writer by raising expectations and pressure. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. ( Adapted from a New York Times article.Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title The Vanishing Half Author Brit Bennett The essay was viewed more than 1 million times in 3 days and drew the attention of a literary agent who emailed her wanting to know if Bennett wanted to write a book. Not long after the court cases absolved the policemen involved in the killings, Bennett wrote an essay for the webwite Jezebel, entitled 'I Don't Know What to Do With Good White People.' Bennett says she felt out of place in Michigan-she was a southern California girl suffering through Midwestern winters and wrestling with the culture shock of being in a mostly white environment.Īt the time that Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and Eric Garner in Staten Island, New York, were killed at the hands of the police, Bennett was completing a writing fellowship at Michigan. She attended Stanford University, where she received her B.A. My mom grew up sharecropping in Louisiana, and my dad grew up in South Central L.A., and both of them were able to scratch and claw and go to college, so what’s my excuse?īennett did leave town. Like Nadia, Bennett was smart and ambitious and eager to get out of the city where she grew up. While she was only 17, she began writing The Mothers-she was the same age as the book's protagonist, Nadia Turner. Her efforts resulted in a play about a coyote and short story about a Native American boy whose home is destroyed.

Their father was Oceanside's first black city attorney, and their mother a finger-print analyst for the country sheriff's department.īennett recalls herself as a serious, driven child, who started writing when she was 7 or 8. The novel is a coming-of-age story surrounding a trio of black teens growing up in southern California.īennett grew up in Oceanside in southern California. Education-B.A., Stanford University M.F.A., University of Michiganīrit Bennett is an American author whose debut novel, The Mothers, was published in 2016.

The vanishing half author