I'm Natalie Moore. I fell in love with soap operas when I was just five years old, and I still

watch them. Their television's longest scripted series and have zero reruns. Now let me tell you,

soap operas aren't just some silly art form. They are significant. In this season of making,

Stories Without End from WB EZ Chicago.

Join me as I share how the genre began, their social impact, and why these stories endure.

Listen, wherever you get your podcast.

From WBEZ Chicago, this is Nerdette.

I'm Greta Johnson.

So you may already know that for the last couple months, we have been doing a Nerdette book club. The deal is we pick a book each month and discuss it

with a rotating panel of awesome humans. Our June pick is Britt Bennett's The Vanishing Half. And

sometimes the author even 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 premise of the vanishing half.

It's a novel.

It's about two light-skinned black girls who are twins.

They run away from a traumatic past in a small town in

Louisiana when they're teenagers in the early 50s. They go to New Orleans and one sister realizes

she can get away with pretending to be white so she abandons her entire family. And the rest of the book

is about those sisters and their totally divergent lives.

It's also about their daughters and identity and what we leave behind when we try to reinvent

ourselves. In a couple weeks, we're going to have a very spoilery panel discussion about

the vanishing half. But today, we are going to have a largely spoilery panel discussion about the vanishing half. But today we are going to have a largely

spoiler-free conversation with Britt. Britt Bennett, welcome to Nerdette. Hi, thanks for having me.

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