“Jude meets Reese, and they fall for each other, and he tells her that he’s trans. So I started to think, okay, once she eventually leaves this place, how is it that she can try to unlearn that hatred?” This is a town that tried to teach her to hate herself. “Once she eventually is able to escape this town as she grows up, how she still carries the town with her, and how she still carries the ideology of the town with her it’s not something that she can just easily shake. “I knew from the beginning that I wanted to introduce Jude, Desirée’s daughter, and … what it would be like for her to grow up in this place, and it was something that I began to … think of as a type of violence, what she suffers,” said Bennett. So for her, it is a decision that she’s making about identity and race, but it’s also a decision that she is making to forge her own life without her sister, and she feels like it’s only possible to forge her own life if she leaves her sister behind.”Ī cross-generational struggle to accept oneself: “I think Stella’s decision to pass is more striking because they are twins and because her decision requires her to leave her sister behind. “But I think twins were particularly interesting to me because of that tightness of that bond, because of the way that, for these twins, they love each other, and they feel also like they are trapped in this claustrophobic relationship at the same time.” “I’m always very interested in sisterhood as a person who has two sisters and is generally just interested in writing about the relationships between and among women,” said Bennett. It’s not like being light spares them from any of those consequences … To me, there was always something really absurd about the idea of this type of community, because it’s pursuing lightness just for its own sake, and … about the implications that that causes on those who live there, and also those who leave.” “This is a community that pursues lightness for its own sake it doesn’t yield any actual, tangible or material benefits for this community,” said Bennett. So they come from a town that is occupied by light-skinned Black people who believe that it’s superior to be light-skinned, and they both have some very different reactions to coming from a place like that.” “The twins come from a town called Mallard, Louisiana, which is a very small farm town that is oriented around the idea of colorism.

The vanishing half book summary