Joraaver Chahal

The Vanishing Half: Book Summary

As children, we dream of who we will be. As adults, we wonder about who it is we have become.

All internal conflicts demand that you pay them their due. Otherwise, they will eat away at your conscience. Brit Bennett’s Vanishing Half makes it painfully obvious how true this is, but in hindsight. As I read her book, I felt like a passenger on a train staring out the window witnessing the hidden power of unresolved identity, the main internal conflict at play. The novel has the reader start by following the lives of two twins, Desiree and Stella. It then transports the reader into the lives of their mother, their lovers, and their daughters to help us understand just how much changes when we decide who it is we really are.

What I love about the story is how large yet diminishing a role race plays throughout the book. In the beginning, the conversation is all about race. Mallard is a town of fair skinned blacks who look down on dark skin. In fact, the twins are some of the fairest girls around, easily passing for white girls if they tried. The catch is, one eventually does, behaving as if she were white. “The hardest part about becoming someone else was deciding to. The rest was only logistics,” she says. Right? But what about the power of internal conflict? The gnawing on the conscience? That’s when it begins. It happens every time she talks with a white man or makes eye contact with a black one. And it never stops.

Towards the end of the book, neither internal monologue nor external conversation hover around race. Instead, it seeps into the core of the lives of the twins’ daughters, Jude and Kennedy. One knows she’s black. The other believes she’s white. Their ambitions are sculpted by how well they know their mothers. Their hesitations are inextricably connected to how well their mothers know themselves. Even the daughters’ personalities are cross-wired reflections of their mothers. Lest we forget that identity is a complex beast.

I felt an odd, twisted sense of respect for the twins. One twin, figuring out who she is without her vanishing half, soldiers on with her life. It isn’t the life she expected, but she trudges forward, living for her mother and her daughter. The other, living the life of a lie, shoulders it all with the hope of a “better” life. Fear plays a strong role in her ability to carry on with that lie. Deceiving her own family clearly weighs on her. But she sticks to it until she can’t. When she comes to grips with the fact that others may know her identity, she faces that challenge too. Not gracefully. Not tactfully. But I like to believe it was the best she could do, given what she had risked to live the life she had chosen.

The important thing to remember is that both chose their lives.

My book club finished discussing this novel last week, and our facilitator asked a final thought-provoking question that I’ll pose here as well.

Who lived the better life?