Brit Bennett On Transgressing Racial Identity In ‘The Vanishing Half’

Nerdette

WBEZ

Tv & Film, Self, Nerd, Books, Technology, Tv, Improvement, Culture, Wbez, Society & Culture, Pop, Nerdette, Nerds

4.7 • 1.4K Ratings

🗓️ 12 June 2020

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Greta talks with Brit Bennett, the author of this month’s Nerdette Book Club selection, The Vanishing Half, which just climbed to the top of The New York Times bestselling fiction list amid nationwide conversations around racial inequality.

The Vanishing Half tells the story of two light-skinned black sisters whose lives take very different directions: Desiree moves back home after escaping an abusive relationship with her dark-skinned husband while Stella chooses to pass as a white woman.

Hear from Brit and then come back later this month for our Nerdette Book Club panel discussion. And remember, we want to hear from you too! Send us a voice memo about your thoughts on the book before Wednesday, June 24

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	This fall, W bez invites you to our upcoming live events.
0:05.0	Join us in person for smart discussions, heartfelt storytelling, and more.
0:09.0	Check out the full calendar now at W be easy.org
0:12.6	slash events.
0:13.6	From W be easy Chicago, this is Nurdette.
0:19.9	I'm Greta Johnson.
0:21.1	So you may already know that for the last couple months we have been doing a nerd at book club.
0:26.2	The deal is we pick a book each month and discuss it with a rotating panel of awesome humans.
0:31.2	Our June pick is Britt Bennett's The Vanishing Half and sometimes the author even
0:37.1	stops by to chat about it and that is exactly what's happening today. So before we get to the conversation here is just sort of like a rough
0:45.0	premise of the vanishing half. It's a novel, it's about two light skin black
0:52.0	girls who are twins. They run away from a
0:54.8	traumatic past in a small town in Louisiana when they're teenagers in the early 50s.
0:59.9	They go to New Orleans and one sister realizes she can get away with pretending to be white so she
1:06.2	abandons her entire family.
1:09.0	And the rest of the book is about those sisters and their totally divergent lives. It's also about their
1:15.3	daughters and identity and what we leave behind when we try to reinvent ourselves.
1:20.0	In a couple weeks we're going to have a very spoilery panel discussion about the
1:27.6	vanishing half but today we are going to have a largely spoiler-free
1:31.4	conversation with Britt.
1:33.7	Britt Bennett, welcome to Nurdett.
1:35.7	Hi, thanks for having me.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from WBEZ, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of WBEZ and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.