REBROADCAST: Author Brit Bennett explores race and identity in her work

Brit Bennett’s book “The Vanishing Half” was on a lot of best-of lists in 2020. Though spanning the second half of the 20th century, the novel speaks to questions about race and identity that have been central to national conversations for the last two years. In that novel and her other writing, Bennett deals with the bonds of family, the importance of storytelling, and the nature of identity. We talked to Bennett about her essays and novels in front of an audience of students on February 17, 2022 at Grant High School in Portland.

Note: This transcript was computer generated and edited by a volunteer.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller coming to you in front of an audience at Portland’s Grant High School today. It is an hour with the writer Brit Bennett. Brit Bennett has become a literary star in the last six years. Her debut novel ‘The Mothers’ was a critical success and a New York Times bestseller. It tells a story of a 17 year old’s secret and the way that secret reverberates into her early adulthood. Bennett followed that up in 2020 with ‘The Vanishing Half’. It is about a secret of a different kind. It focuses on twin sisters who grew up in a small Black community in Louisiana before one leaves her old life behind when she decides to pass as a white woman. Bennett’s books are page turners whose pages are filled with ideas about race and gender and identity, about family and friendship, about keeping things hidden and sharing who we are. Brit Bennett, it is a pleasure to have you on the show.

Brit Bennett: Hi, thanks for having me.

Miller: I want to start with that first novel that I mentioned, ‘The Mothers’. It’s about a lot of things, but in terms of its most stripped down plot, it’s about a girl who has an abortion near the end of her high school years and in the ways that that decision ripples for awhile, not just in her life, but in other lives. I understand that you actually started that novel, or what turned into that novel, when you were 16 years old. What was your initial idea for that book?

Bennett: I think the initial idea was a different main character. It was a different setting. It was a really different book in a lot of ways. But I think that that secret was always at the heart of the book. I was really writing toward what I felt anxious about when I was 16 or 17, the idea that this unwanted pregnancy could throw somebody’s life off track and could force somebody to have to make some tough choices. So, I think I was really writing towards my own anxieties at the time, but of course, the book took a lot longer to finish and over time the book kind of grew up and evolved as I was growing up.

Miller: What were you like in high school, that you were writing a novel?

Bennett: I think you can probably tell. I think you answered your own question. I mean, I think I was a pretty nerdy person. I had my core group of friends, but I was not having any type of fun, crazy high school experience. I was very much… I loved books. I loved reading and writing, and I always wanted to tell stories. So that was something that I’d always just kind of done, sort of secretly and quietly when I was in high school.

Miller: What gave you the, maybe the word is bravery, the sense of bravery that you could write a novel when you were that young?

Bennett: I don’t think I would have thought of it at the time as brave because I think that that’s one of the really exciting things about being young, which is that you don’t have the same awareness of what you’re like. I wasn’t aware that I was doing something that was strange or that I was doing something that was unusual. It was just what I wanted to do.

Miller: You read books, so you figured you’d write one.

Bennett: Sure. But I think about people who I asked to read drafts of my book and it never occurred to me as a 17 or 18 year old that to say, ‘oh, I’m writing a novel’ is something that would be strange, or to ask somebody to read the novel would be strange. I wasn’t aware. I didn’t have the same anxiety about all of the things that could go wrong. I wasn’t as easily embarrassed. I think I wasn’t as insecure about those types of things when I was that age. So, I think it was actually a strength that I started at that young.

Miller: It does seem like a blessing. I mean, more self awareness is maybe a double-edged sword in that sense that as you get older, you’re more aware of all the things that can go wrong.

Bennett: Terrible to be self-aware.

Miller: Probably a better writer, but more self-critical.

Bennett: Yes.

Miller: It’s not uncommon for artists of a lot of different genres to just look at something, or think about something, they started when they were young and shelve it. We hear about the novels that are in people’s drawers that they started when they were young. What kept you persevering with this idea through college, through grad school?

Bennett: I wrote other drafts of other things that I did shelve at the time, but I think there was something about this story in particular that I just found really compelling, and for whatever reason I just believed that someday this story could be good in a way that I didn’t feel that way about other things that I dabbled with. I don’t know. It was something about the story that just hooked into me and didn’t quite let go.

Miller: Let’s take a question from our audience. Go ahead.

Eva: Hi, my name is Eva. My question for you is, what made you gravitate towards making most of your main characters female, and did that aspect of intersectionality make the characters easier or harder to dive into and create?

Bennett: Thank you. Thank you for that question. I think I’ve always been really interested in writing mostly about the lives of girls and women. I grew up in a really predominantly female household. I have sisters, no brother, so I was always surrounded by this world of women that I found really fascinating as I was growing up. I don’t know. There’s something about being able to write about these complicated relationships between and among women, because I think my personal relationships with my sisters, with my female friends, with my mother, those have always been very great relationships, but also very fraught relationships, and very complicated relationships. So, I think it comes from that place, and being able to write in particular mostly about Black women, being able to write about the ways in which their lives are informed by race and gender. All of that, I think, has been really interesting for me just to think about how those different aspects of their identity are affecting their lives.

Miller: For people who haven’t read ‘The Mothers’, and this gets to part of what you were just saying, can you describe the chorus of voices that’s one definition of the title?

Bennett: The book is narrated in part by this chorus of church mothers who are these 80, 90 year old women at this church who were watching and observing and commenting on the lives of these younger characters.

Miller: They are nosy and judgmental and kind and wise and tired. Did you know, women like that?

Bennett: Yes, I grew up going to church and I saw these women, their sort of roving presence, and felt very surveilled by them when I was young. I think when I went into thinking about the framing for this book, I loved the idea of there being this intergenerational story that you are deeply and closely within the lives of these young people. You see the way that these older characters are misjudging them, or the ways that they are misinterpreting what is happening. But at the same time, you also see, as you said, some of that wisdom that these older characters have that the younger characters don’t have access to.

Miller: Surveilled is not necessarily a positive feeling at any age, but especially when you’re young. Did you also feel love from them or not at that time?

Bennett: I think I sensed it, but I think it doesn’t hit the same until maybe you get a little bit older…

Miller: And see them as people.

Bennett: Yeah. And I think that’s also something that the younger characters miss because they don’t know what has happened in these older women’s lives. They don’t know the ways that they have experienced these horrific losses. They don’t know the details of their lives because again, when you’re 17 and you’re interacting with somebody who’s 80 or 90, you don’t see them necessarily as a person. You just see them as, like I said, the surveilling figure who is judging you for partying, or who’s judging you for what you’re wearing. That was I think a lot of the ways in which I experienced these older figures at the time, and I think now I have a little bit more of a nuanced views. I’ve gotten a little older.

Miller: We are saying this in front of a bunch of 17 year olds. Do you see us as surveillors or human beings? No comment.

Bennett: They said mixed. It’s a mix. That’s fair.

Miller: Yeah, half and half. When I was reading ‘The Mothers’, and especially as the book goes on and we learn a little bit more about their lives, it got me thinking that it was very possible that groups of women like this chorus have actual book clubs in real life and might read your actual book. Did you hear from church ladies like the ones in your book about ‘The Mothers’ or about ‘The Vanishing Half’?

Bennett: Yeah, I definitely heard from some about ‘The Mothers’. I think an interesting thing to the reception of ‘The Mothers’ that struck me was talking to people from all over the world about this book, and everyone feeling a sense of familiarity with this type of figure. I remember I was in Italy and somebody was like, ‘yeah, we have these women here.’ Like, ‘we have these types of older women at the church community who are watching and commenting on your lives.’ So I did hear from some readers, and for some people who have had experience in these types of really close- knit communities reading the book.

Miller: It’s such a good example of this thing that we’ve talked about in the past with the author, that when you add specificity about any particular community’s lived experience, it both sharpens the portrait of a particular group of people or experience, but it also makes it weirdly universal.

Bennett: Yeah, I tell people that all the time, that if you set out to write something that’s going to appeal to everybody, it won’t. It will fall short of that. I think trying to be universal is what flattens your work. But when you write about whatever your specific context is, or whatever the specific world that you want to create when you write about that in such detail, you will find that people outside of that context connect to it.

Miller: So, these women in your first novel, they’re the narrators for just chunks of it, often early parts of chapters. But the main narration comes from an omniscient narrator who takes us basically inside the minds of the different characters, and that’s the same style you use for ‘The Vanishing Half. We get inside people’s heads. Why do you like omniscient narration?

Bennett: Yeah, I love omniscient narration and I think it’s something that’s kind of gone out of fashion.

Miller: It’s not cool?

Bennett: It’s not cool. No, no, no. It’s not cool, I remember hearing when I was in grad school, we had different conversations about why that was. I remember I had a professor who said that, for a lot of people, it kind of feels like the voice of God, and we have suspicions about that concept now. For other people, it can feel as we were talking about surveillance. It can feel sort of like Big Brother watching you as you’re reading the book, like Big Brother is watching these characters. People don’t trust that either, for different reasons. So I think there’s a lot of ways in which it’s kind of fallen out of fashion. But I love it as a reader and as a writer, because to me an omniscient narrator posits that everybody in that world is interesting. Everybody in that world has a point of view. The narrator can pop in the heads of everybody sitting in this auditorium. Everyone gets to be the main character if they can be. I think there’s something democratic about it, actually, that I really love. That the idea that the narrator has access to everyone, and the idea that there can be a very minor character that you see once, but you get to spend time in that person’s thoughts and they become this fully-realized person.

Miller: That line about God is interesting because it reminded me that when I was reading ‘The Vanishing Half’, there are times here and there, you don’t do it that often because I think it wouldn’t work if you did it a lot, but where you let us know later in life the character would think this, or eventually this happened. You take us ahead a little bit and you show us that you are sort of the puppet master. Every time I encountered those moments, because I was reading this recently, still in pandemic head, it gave me such a sense of comfort that even if things weren’t gonna turn out well for these characters, there was some overall presence that knew what was happening, which is not a feeling that I get much these days.

Bennett: Yeah, I agree with that. I think there is a sense that somebody’s in charge when you’re reading this kind of omniscient narration, which can be disturbing or it can be comforting, as you said.

Miller: If the world is disturbing, that can be comforting.

Bennett: Yes, it can be comforting.

Miller: You know what you’re talking about in terms of getting inside people’s heads and showing that all the characters have point of view and have lives, have brains and minds, it does get to this maybe now hackneyed idea that literature, that reading novels in particular, it’s like an empathy machine. I’ve heard people push back against that, but I’m wondering what you see as the power of books to change our minds, or open up our minds, and the limitations.

Bennett: I think, as you said, when you read a book, you have access to another person’s thoughts. There’s really no other aspect of life where you have that access. You think about the person that you are closest to in the world, you have never thought their thoughts.

Miller: They can tell us.

Bennett: They can tell us, but we don’t know if what they’re telling us is true. We don’t know if that’s what they’re really feeling. There’s always a little bit of distance, right? So I feel like reading novels actually creates the experience of thinking as another person is thinking, which is a unique experience. It’s different than films, different than television, it is different than all these other things. But that’s the same thing. Like you said, there’s limitations to that. I think that it can be this very pat solution. I think about the rise of the anti-racist reading list that happened a couple of years ago, and this idea that people could just read themselves out of problematic ways of thinking, or you could read this book and that will suddenly change your heart and mind. That’s not something that I think is true completely. I don’t think that books are just this, like you said, empathy machine. But I certainly think that that experience of thinking what somebody else is thinking, I think it does do something to you. I think particularly with fiction, because it tricks you a little bit, like you may be a person who thinks ‘I don’t care about passing. I don’t want to read a book about passing.’ But then you start reading a story about these sisters and a family, and you get invested in the lives of those people, and suddenly you’re reading a book about an idea or about a theme that you thought you were uninterested in. So I do think that’s something that is kind of unique to fiction in that way.

Miller: Let’s take another question from our audience. Go ahead and if you don’t mind telling us your name too.

Emma Marcello: Hi, my name is Emma Marcello. I was wondering, is there a certain headspace you have to get into when you write? If so, is that headspace healthy? Or does your work sometimes come from struggle?

Bennett: Ooh, that’s a deep question. Thank you for that question. I think it’s true. I think I find it hard to write if I am super stressed about something. I don’t think I write well from a place of anger. I think there are certain emotional states that are not conducive for me to be creative. I do think there is something that has to be really immersive when you’re writing, where it has to kind of consume you. I’m not sure how healthy that is, but there is, for me when I’m writing, I do have to stay in that headspace where I am thinking about these other characters and I’m thinking about this other world all the time. I think it can be something where if you’re particularly writing something that’s really sad or really painful, it can sort of keep you in that emotional state. But I try to keep a balance, and I don’t want to completely immerse myself so much in the work that that has completely taken over my actual life. But I think it’s important to know what space you need to be in to create, because that’s different for everybody.

Miller: When you say you can’t write if you’re coming from a place of anger, how do you deal with that if you are angry?

Bennett: That’s a good question. I mean I think it’s there and I think also like I said, it’s different for everybody because I know there are some people who have written some great things from places of anger.

Miller: Do you feel like you can read that?

Bennett: Yeah, I think I can read it. But for me, I don’t think I’m interesting when I’m angry. I don’t think that’s interesting to read. I think there’s something flat about it. And I think that when I’m most excited about my writing, it’s because my writing is open. It’s because I’m asking questions. So the idea of writing like a rant about something, I just think it’s not interesting coming from me, I guess that there’s some people who write great rants, but for me, I think my writing is better when it’s open and not from this like defensive crouch and I don’t I think that’s boring when I write that way.

Miller: Let’s take another question from our audience.

Eva Brogan: Hi. I’m Eva Brogan. And my question is, do you have any advice for someone who is struggling with writer’s block?

Bennett: Well, thank you. That’s a great question. I mean, the first thing I would say is that everybody gets writer’s block. I think it’s a very normal part of the process and accepting it as normal, I think, is the first step. And the second thing I would say is when I’m blocked, I try to think about why I’m blocked because there can be different reasons. Sometimes it’s because you’re bored with what you’re writing and you need to then take a step back and think about a different direction that you can take it in, why you’re bored with it, because if you’re bored writing it, everyone’s gonna be bored reading it. So that’s a red flag. Sometimes it’s just because you’re kind of empty, like you need to go read, read something, you need to go watch something, you need to take a walk. You need to get away from just staring at your computer screen. So sometimes it’s sort of that path. But I think that the most important thing is to try to identify why you’re stuck with what you’re working on. And sometimes the best thing you can do is just kind of walk away from it, take a break from it, think about something else, read something else and then come back to it later.

Miller: How do you know when you have a book that is, especially I’m thinking about when you have a full draft done and something you know so intimately, it doesn’t have to be the book that you worked on for 10 years, but for a number of years, when you then go back to read it again, how do you read it with fresh enough eyes to know what works and what doesn’t, when you know all your own tricks, you know what’s coming, you know what came before?

Bennett: Yeah, I think that that’s one of the hardest things because sometimes I am rereading something and I’m thinking: is this bad or am I just sick of it? Am I just tired of looking at this forever or does this actually need work? So I think one thing I try to do is try to take that step away from it, try to take time away from it. I think that’s the best thing you can do, is leave time between when you return to it, so you do have a little bit of freshness to it. And then also, I think that sometimes we have to bring in somebody else, ask someone else to read it and help me see it in a new way because after a while you do get sick of, it’s particularly for me for beginnings because you probably rework the beginning of something more than you rework any other part. So when I have to go back and rewrite the beginning, I’m just sick of reading those same sentences and that doesn’t mean that they don’t work. It just means I’m kind of tired of it.

Miller: Let’s take another question. Go ahead.

Jocelyn: Hi, I’m Jocelyn. My question is about your book, ‘The Vanishing Half’. Did Stella resent Kennedy, knowing her daughter was just like the sister she left?

Bennett: Thank you for that question. So this is a question, I kind of get a variety of versions of sometimes about the twins each having a daughter and the daughter’s kind of mirroring the lost twin and I think that that was something that I wanted to explore in part because the book is about these sisters who spend so much of their lives apart. So the question for me then is how can I make them feel present in each other’s lives, even if they’re not physically present all the time? And the idea of each having a daughter that kind of fills that gap a little bit makes you, I think makes each sister both miss her sister, and also kind of remind her of the things of her sister that perhaps she did not get along with or like, so that was definitely something that I wanted to do on purpose to kind of evoke the missing sister.

Miller: In earlier interviews about ‘The Vanishing Half’, I’ve seen you say that you didn’t want this book and you didn’t want passing, the act of passing to be put in a moralizing way? You didn’t want the question to be, is it good or bad to pass. When you took that away, what did that open up in terms of what you could explore?

Bennett: Yeah, like I said, I always want to write towards questions because questions are opening the book instead of shutting it down. And when I’m thinking about questions, I don’t want to write towards a yes or no question because that gives you two options, right? So as soon as you take away that binary option of yes or no, is she good or is she bad, it does open the book in a lot of ways. It allowed me then to just explore how does this choice that this person make affect her life? How does it affect the lives of those around her, her daughter, the rest of her family, her marriage? Those are questions that pointed out in a million different directions versus yes, she’s good or no, she’s bad or whatever.

Miller: We’re talking here about the central secret in the book, the passing, a young Black woman who passes as white. But there’s an important side character, a young transgender man named Reese. Why did you want to include his story? And the time there is basically in the 1980s, late 70s, early 80s.

Bennett: For me, Reese was always an interesting counterpoint to Stella’s story because his journey was one towards himself while Stella’s was one away from herself. And I found that to be a really interesting contrast. I loved the idea of their stories kind of pressing against each other and creating that friction, that Reese is somebody who is changing on the outside, but he’s moving toward himself and Stella is somebody who does not change physically, but she ends up becoming emotionally and psychologically a completely different person than she was at the beginning of the book.

Miller: If for the passing issue, you didn’t want it to be a moralizing question, what didn’t you want to do in your treatment of Reese?

Bennett: A lot of things. As a cisgender writer, I was aware of a lot of the really harmful tropes that are often used in writing about trans characters. So I didn’t want to be exploitative about his story. I didn’t want to flatten his story onto Stella’s and make those parallel instead of making them kind of intentional with each other. I didn’t want to say his story was the same, that that experience was the same as Stella’s experience, and I didn’t want to, I didn’t want to write it in a way that felt sensationalized. I wanted to write about a character who I found really interesting in a relationship that I found really interesting.

Miller: Let’s take another question from our audience. Go ahead.

Nessa Gray: Hi, my name is Nessa Gray. In your ‘Ta-Nehisi Coates And A Generation of Waking Up’, you speak of the chasm as a waking up of sorts. Do you believe that having a chasm is necessary in the part of coping with being Black in America, specifically a Black author? And do you think it has to be as traumatizing as yours and many other Black people’s chasms are?

Bennett: That’s a good question. I mean, I hope that it won’t be. I hope that it won’t be traumatizing for everyone. I think that I wanted to write that essay in part of thinking about these transformative generational moments that we experience, these moments that I experienced personally where I kind of lost hope and what the future would hold. I think that we all are experiencing, for a lot of people that experience was probably June 2020, people have different experiences that they’re going from that way. So I wanted to write that essay towards that moment and thinking about that book, but I mean, I hope that it won’t always be traumatic for people, but you know, I don’t know. I try not to be a cynical person, but at the same time, I don’t know that I have, I don’t think I have that same sense of hopefulness that I did when I was, you know, 17, 18 years old. So I’m hoping that in future generations that won’t be the experience, but I guess we’ll see.

Miller: Nessa, if you don’t mind, could I ask you, I mean I’m curious based on your question. What went through your mind when you read about the chasm as Brit describes it?

Nessa Gray: Well, I could relate a lot. I feel like especially in younger generations now there’s a lot of pessimism and like you said, you don’t want to be cynical, you don’t want to be pessimistic, but it’s hard to have that hope. And I think even now it’s like 17 year olds, 16 year olds, 18 year olds, the hope is not there. And our chasms were very traumatic, but I think it in turn made our waking up and our coming to a lot more strong, came with a lot bigger power, a lot more anger behind it. And I think that can turn into some really great things.

Miller: Thanks very much for sharing that. Before we take a break, I’m just curious Brit, in an essay in November of 2017, so this was a year after Donald Trump was elected, you wrote “Throughout the year, I’ve struggled to find the balance between remaining politically engaged and rightfully outraged versus protecting my own sanity and peace.” And you actually referenced a speech that Toni Morrison gave at Portland State University in 1975 in that essay. What’s that struggle like for you right now between remaining engaged and as you say rightfully outraged, but also protecting both your own sanity and carving out space for your own work?

Bennett: I think it’s challenging, I think all of us are experiencing that because we live in a time where we have computers in our pockets, where at any given moment we can know any outrageous thing that is happening anywhere in the world. And I think about something my friend Jia Tolentino wrote for the New Yorker, where she talked about how, like our ability to learn about things has far outpaced, sort of our ability to cope with them, and that’s just kind of the reality that we’re all living in. So it’s hard because I never want to be someone who is checking out and who is opting out of these things that are happening that demand our attention, but at the same time, like I said, I don’t I know that I don’t write well from a place of anger, I know that I don’t write well from this place of defensiveness. Everyone has to kind of protect their mental health and protect what allows them to create. So it’s something that I still struggle with, of trying to not feel like I can opt out, but also feeling like I’m protecting myself because we all just have so much access to everything that’s happening at all times, which is great, but also overwhelming.

Miller: We’ve got to take a short break, but we’re gonna have a lot more from Brit Bennett and our audience here at Grant High School. Stay tuned.

This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. We are coming to you today in front of an audience of high school students at Grant High School in Northeast Portland. During the break, you just missed the bell saying that another period is about to start. We are spending the hour today with the novelist and essayist, Brit Bennett. She’s published two novels in the last six years, ‘The Vanishing Half’ and ‘The Mothers’, both of them New York Times bestsellers. One of the themes that is central to both of your novels is holding secrets and the very different reasons that people do. So what interests you in secrets?

Bennett: Oh yeah, I love secrets. I love writing about secrets. I think that as soon as you introduce a secret in a book, there is tension created because as the reader you’re waiting to find out, okay, what’s going to happen if somebody discovers the secret, what will be the consequences?

Miller: We also have this delicious power because the way you write your books, we know the secrets.

Bennett: Yes, and I think that’s that, I mean I had a writing professor who said once that you create tension by revealing information, not by withholding it. So by telling the reader something that actually makes it more tense than if you don’t tell the reader. So yeah, I mean, I think it creates a sense of power like you said for the reader because you’re putting the superior position over the characters where you know something that they don’t know. And it creates this tension while you’re waiting for that secret to come out and explode.

Miller: Let’s take a question from our audience.

Denali Williams: Hi, I’m Denali Williams. In your essay ‘Ta-Nehisi Coates and The Generation Waking Up’ with the New Yorker, you talked about how Black women’s disproportionate struggles are often overlooked and the death of Trayvon Martin made you notice that these thoughts were even instilled in you. In ‘The Vanishing Half’, we saw evidence of this phenomenon with Desiree making excuses for Sam’s behavior. Was one piece of writing inspired by the other?

Bennett: Thank you for that question. I don’t know that I was consciously making that connection, but I do think that that was something that I’m always thinking about. Like I said earlier, I’m mostly writing about the lives of Black women and Black girls. And I think that tension, this idea that Black men are uniquely at risk in ways that Black women don’t face danger, that was certainly an idea that I heard growing up that never felt true to me. And I think that that’s something that I’m always thinking about as these Black women are moving through the world. What are the specific threats to that that they experience? I think about Stella in ‘The Vanishing Half’ who is put in danger because she is working as a domestic worker in the house of a white family and that’s like a unique danger that was experienced by a lot of Black women and still experienced by a lot of women who are domestic workers. That is a type of gendered and racialized violence.

Miller: How do you approach writing scenes of violence? The way I read them, I mean, if this were a movie, your camera would sort of, wouldn’t be looking at it straight on and certainly not, it wouldn’t be a lingering shot.

Bennett: Yes.

Miller: How do you think about writing those scenes?

Bennett: Yeah, I agree. And I think it’s very intentional. I think that that’s one way that I have to consume them. I can’t, I struggle to watch things that are particularly, have a lot of violence against women and girls, that’s just something I cannot really do. And even thinking about footage of like police killings, like I reached a point in my life where I was like, I’m not going to watch these videos because I always worried in real life, what I worry about in fiction, which is that seeing that violence over and over sort of flattens it for you and it becomes something that washes over you a little bit and it doesn’t, this idea of like forcing people to look at something directly is what will sort of jolt them…

Miller: And make it real?

Bennett: Right. I think maybe to some extent that happens, but I also think there’s to some extent, it becomes just sort of another thing that you’re scrolling past on Twitter,

so I think that I’ve always wanted to, if I’m going to portray violence, I want to do it in a way that feels responsible and in a way that doesn’t feel gratuitous or a way that’s not presenting it as sort of lurid and entertaining. And I think that’s both kind of my personal and sort of moral feeling. But also I think that’s an aesthetic choice because I think the idea of the twins witnessing this moment of violence as children through a crack in the closet door. To me, that’s the way I have to experience violence when I’m watching it. But I think that it almost becomes more horrifying because of what you’re not seeing versus me forcing you to look directly at this very bloody scene that we’ve seen a million times. So it doesn’t hit the same. I think aesthetically and morally it’s just something I just can’t really do.

Miller: I want to go back to the question of secrets because for a lot of your characters, what comes along with keeping secrets is loneliness of various kinds, the loneliness of not being known or at least not being known fully. I’m curious what it means to you to be known.

Bennett: Yeah, I think that that’s something that I feel very mixed about because I think that there, what I’m thinking about these characters in particular, there is an intimacy that people are seeking and that they want to create. But there’s also a danger that comes along with intimacy. There’s a danger with letting somebody get too close to you, to know the things that you care about or are ashamed of or that you secretly want. As soon as somebody knows that about you, they kind of have like a knife to your throat and there’s a feeling I think that you have reading when that happens in a book and also feeling that we often have moving through the world that as soon as you’ve told somebody a secret, you have given them sort of this power over you in a way, but you have also created this closeness. And I think that my characters are always kind of torn between those two poles. And that’s something I think about often just moving through the world, that there is something really beautiful about letting somebody in, but there’s something very dangerous about it too.

Miller: At one point in ‘The Mothers’ you write about one of your characters, you say, “I’ve heard that she didn’t feel unburdened by sharing hard truths. Hard truths never lightened.” And the context here is important. This character is a survivor of childhood sexual abuse. So that’s one of the hard truths that she doesn’t really share with people, at least not explicitly and maybe not for a while. What do you think can come from sharing hard truths?

Bennett: I think it really depends on the character or the circumstance, like you said. Aubrey is a character who, like her method of coping is to button everything up and never sort of let it out. And I think Stella is a similar character too, someone who moves to the world in that way. But I think of other characters in ‘The Vanishing Half’ who do reveal things about themselves. I think about, Jude and Reese, like when Reese tells Jude about his past, that brings them closer together. There are other characters who create those moments of intimacy and create those moments of liberation by telling people things that they might keep hidden from others.

Miller: It seems like it’s earned with previous intimacy. I mean, it’s earned, it happens because there’s trust.

Bennett: Yes, I think so. And I think that that tension there, like I said, that you are potentially putting yourself in harm’s way by revealing something about yourself. At the same time, I also wanted to write about secrets in a way that doesn’t condemn the keeping of secrets because I think that keeping secrets is often good. I’m not against keeping secrets. I think it’s often good sort of fictionally, like I said as a writer, it’s a tool, but also I think, Reese does not tell everyone in the in the book that he’s trans, like that’s not something he reveals to everyone, and that’s not a decision that I would ever judge him, not revealing that. So I didn’t want to condemn and say everyone needs to tell everyone everything that has ever happened to them, and it’s always good to unburden yourself. Like I think we have that since in the culture that it’s always good to reveal and to open up and…

Miller: Get it out.

Bennett: Yeah, get it out. And I think sometimes that can be useful, but there are other times where it’s not useful to tell people things about yourself, where it’s actually putting yourself in harm’s way to tell people things about yourself. So I didn’t want to condemn the keeping of secrets, I just want to explore all the different iterations of what happens when you tell people things and when you don’t.

Miller: Have you found, now having written two books that in different ways, talk about and explore secrets, have people come to you with their secrets?

Bennett: Strangers do a lot. I’ve received many emails and DM’s, a lot of stories of people who’ve had abortions. I remember going to do a radio interview and the person interviewing me told me about their abortion. It was pre Roe V. Wade, so it was a very horrifying story of what she experienced and it’s like illegal, somebody’s apartment in D.C.

Miller: On the radio or before?.

Bennett: This is before. People that I’ve been interacting with who tell me these stories and ‘The Vanishing Half’ has led to a lot of conversations from people about their complicated family histories and their, I had this aunt who disappeared and I never knew what happened to her and now I’m thinking maybe she passed, so I’ve had a lot of people come to me and I think when you write a book, people feel closeness to you in some way and they want to sort of unburden themselves to you...

Miller: And burden you.

Bennett: Which is something I didn’t expect when I wrote a book, but I think that is, that has been a result of both of those books of people wanting to share these things about their lives.

Miller: One of the interesting things about that is that it’s sort of a way, it’s a way of of sharing a secret and not because I mean, you’re basically a stranger to these people and so they can keep the secret in terms of the spheres where people actually know them, but they can say it to somebody.

Bennett: Oh yeah, it’s super safe. You send it to me on my email and it’s just you’ve unburdened yourself in a way, you’ve released it, but there’s no risk of, we’re probably never going to meet or encounter each other, so I don’t mind it if that makes people feel better.

Miller: You don’t feel burdened, to use that same word, by the weight of people’s pain or stories?

Bennett: I can’t take it on, you know? I think if you take it on you will, but that’s something for me, I think a lot of my experience as an author has been having to create some distance between myself and the book and also between myself and the readers to some extent, which is what I need to not feel like you said, feel completely, if people like the book, if they hate the book, if they want to complain about the ending, if I took that on every time, I just wouldn’t be able to to go on with my life.

Miller: Are there book ideas in any of these emails?

Bennett: There are book ideas, there are sequel ideas, there are dreamcasts. There’s a lot of thoughts that..

Miller: People tell you how your book should have ended?

Bennett: Yes.

Miller: It’s like sending fan fiction to the author.

Bennett: Yes, which again, I’m always just like, okay, that’s great, that was the idea that you liked…

Miller: Write your own book.

Bennett: You’re right, but I can’t take that on myself.

Miller: If you’re just tuning in, we’re talking right now with Brit Bennett. She is the author of ‘The Vanishing Half’ and ‘The Mothers’. Soon after ‘The Vanishing Half’ was published, HBO, this was big news, it bought the rights to make it into a limited series with you as one of the executive directors. Since that happened, and that was I think 2 years ago, now since it happened when you watch TV, do you watch it differently?

Bennett: I don’t know if I watch it differently, but I saw the Underground Railroad, the Colson Whitehead adaptation which I did watch a little bit selfishly. I loved that book and I was really excited to see what they did with it. But there was a little part of me that was also: how did they adapt this? What were the choices they made? I thought that was such a beautiful adaptation because it took leaps. It took some departures from the book, but it also captured the spirit of the book and that was always what I wanted. So there’s some things like that that I do watch in that way, but most of the time when I’m watching TV, I’m always thinking about it from a story perspective but I don’t know that I’m thinking about it necessarily in relation to ‘The Vanishing Half’.

Miller: What has the creative process been like so far?

Bennett: It’s been really different, TV is much more collaborative, which is very strange for me as a novelist who’s used to working alone. So that has been something to adjust to, I think having a lot more voices in the room and I think also, like I said, about having to create that distance, I think whenever you have a work of adaptation you have to, if you’re being adapted, you have to create that distance because the work is going to change. Even if I was writing it myself, it would change and I have to, you can’t be sort of backseat driving and calling over, I would do this, no, I would do that.

Miller: But how do you not? I mean these are your children.

Bennett: I think you have to understand that it’s a different thing, like this is not my book. So ‘The Vanishing Half’ on the TV show will be different than ‘The Vanishing Half’ the book is and it’s a different medium, there are different things, some things that work in a book that are not going to work on screen and vice versa, so I think you have to just kind of create, I’m not saying it’s easy to do, but I think you have to create a little bit of that distance or you will just lose your mind wanting to step in and change things or insist, because part of it is like somebody comes in and says the way that you did it before is not good enough, we’re going to do it a different way. And that requires I think some humility of you to accept that and not take that as sort of just this criticism or this rejection.

Miller: Why wouldn’t they say the way you did was amazing? That’s why we want it, that’s why we bought it and we’re turning it into a TV show, but it’s not perfect as a TV show because what made it great as a book is different.

Bennett: I think that’s what they tell you, but the way that I said it is what I hear.

Miller: It just wasn’t good enough and we’re gonna punch it up. But what about what we were talking about earlier, that as you noted, one of the things that makes books perhaps unique in all art is their ability to put us inside the heads of other human beings. How are you dealing with not having that in the new version of your story?

Bennett: I think that that’s one of the challenges towards adapting it, is not having access to that interiority and the interior lives of these characters, and also I think the story is told out of chronological order. So figuring out how to make that, I think you see that a lot more on TV, so it’s something that we’re used to as viewers, how to understand, but that’s another thing of trying to adjust to it. So, people, they’re trying different things. I don’t know that we’ve cracked it yet, but I think that’s one of the biggest challenges. I think we knew going into it was how do you create that access to these characters’ interior worlds in a way where you can’t just think their thoughts as you can in a book.

Miller: Let’s take another question from our audience. Go ahead.

Kyle Napati: My name is Kyle Napati. How has becoming famous affected your writing and what topics do you want to focus on in the future?

Miller: Can we take this one by one? I like that. So, at first how has becoming famous affected your writing? That’s the first one.

Bennett: That was a very kind question. I would never say that I have become famous.

Miller: But did you become successful? I mean, you can, even if you’re being humble, your debut novel and your second novel were published to critical acclaim and they sold a lot of books. It’s not true of the vast majority of authors.

Bennett: That’s true. I guess I just generally believe that no writer is famous. Like I I think Stephen King could walk through these doors and most people would not know his face, I just think that’s kind of the nature of writing.

Miller: Right. You’re not a movie star who’s recognized.

Bennett: You’re not Brad Pitt or somebody walking through the door. You’re a person whose name we know, we know your work, but we don’t necessarily know what you look like.

Miller: All that is self deprecation because but so has the, even if success in the literary world is different than success in pop or movies, it is success. How do you deal with it?

Bennett: I think that it can create a sense of pressure on you. I think to hint at the second part of that question, there is a sense of increased expectations, there’s certainly more demands, but I think that the flip side and how I’ve chosen to look at it is that it gives you some freedom. I think that it frees you up to do what you want to do next in a way that you can’t necessarily do without that. You know, I’ve done X Y Z to get here. So I’ve always been thinking about what writers do after they have, like a hit, like what’s their next thing? And I think about somebody like Ta-Nehisi Coates writing a comic book or Colson Whitehead wrote ‘Nickel Boys’ and then he wrote a heist novel. I don’t know if I’m gonna do as hard of a pivot, I know that I can’t write a comic book. So I know that that’s not something I would do, but I love the idea of writers who have experienced success saying, okay, I’m gonna go do something that is fun to me, I’m gonna go do something that’s different, I’m going to go do something that’s maybe not what you expect. But I’m going to do what I want to do because I’ve afforded, the success I’ve had has afforded me the freedom to do the next thing that I want to do. That’s something that would make me happy.

Miller: That’s so interesting because your answer shows how this is both a creative enterprise, but also a business. And it seems like when you’ve, you’ve earned the freedom to tell the publisher, hey, trust me on this, is that another way to put it?

Bennett: Yeah, I think so. I mean, I think that that’s, there is like, I mean it very much is a business that’s kind of gross to talk about, but it is a business and I think about like actors who have been nominated for an Oscar, won an Oscar, and what their next opportunities can be, it does create new chances for you to do different things. So yeah, I mean, I think about it in that way, but also you hope that because you’ve built some goodwill with readers, that readers will go with you. So if I decided my next book is about robots, I hope that people who are like, I don’t know if I want to read about robots, but I liked her book, I guess I’ll see what she’s doing. Like I hope that I’ve earned some of that good will with readers who you’ve built some trust with them, so they’re willing to go with you into whatever wild new direction you want to go.

Miller: I want to go back to the fans who send you improved versions of the endings of your novels because actually one of the many things I love about your novels is the endings. They’re, to me, they’re little magic tricks where they do feel like an ending like that you’ve arrived at some place that’s a recognizable stopping point, but you leave so many things up in the air. A lot of questions about their futures and partly it’s because your characters are still young, but there’s, I don’t totally know what they’re gonna do, a lot of your characters, and the book is done. How do you think about your endings?

Bennett: Well thank you for saying that because nobody ever does. I get a lot of very riled up readers about the endings. I think in part because of what you said, it leaves a lot of questions and I think there are a lot of readers who remember. When my cousin finished ‘The Mother,’ she called me to complain about the ending because she wanted to know what was going to happen to the characters and it doesn’t quite give you that satisfaction, but I think those are the types of endings that I really love. I think about one of my favorite endings ever, which is Toni Morrison’s ‘Song of Solomon’, which ends with somebody leaping into the air. And that’s how it ends with the leap. And I always think about that, I want to end with this leap and I think ‘The Vanishing Half’ does that in kind of a literal way. But I always want to end with that feeling that the story is going on once I close the book, I don’t want to feel like everything has been wrapped up very neatly to me. So I generally find endings very hard because you want to give a sense of satisfaction, but I also don’t want to tie everything up really neatly. But at the same time, I love that feeling of ‘Yeah, I’m feeling like the characters are living lives once you finish the book’.

Miller: Do you have your own private versions of what those lives are like? Or do they remain in midair for you too?

Bennett: I think they kind of remain in midair for me because even when people ask about, will there be a sequel? Like if I had to write a sequel to ‘The Vanishing Half’ or to ‘The Mothers’, I have no idea what those sequels would be right now. Like I’m not sure that I would know, ‘Okay what is Nadia Turner doing when she’s 50?’ Like, I don’t know that I have that in my head. So they think they remain in midair for me, which I don’t know, I enjoy it as a writer and as a person who also has to read the book a million times in order to finish it.

Miller: What do you feel like you’re getting better at as a writer or want to get better at?

Bennett: I want to get better at a lot of things. I think I definitely, the biggest thing for me is always time. I think that time is the most impossible thing to figure out because there are a million different ways that you can handle time in a book. And again, I think one of the beauties of fiction is that you can move in any direction with time in one paragraph. It could be like, you know, Brit is on stage and she was thinking about yesterday and then 50 years from now she will be doing da da da da. Like I could go and past, present, future, whatever, in one paragraph, I could tell you 100 years of time in one sentence. I could tell you, there’s just infinite choices. So that’s something that I’m always trying to figure out is, when I’m reading books, I’m always obsessed over how other writers manage time, how they handle it, when they compress it, when they expand it, when they linger, when they skip something, when they don’t show me what happened. That’s the biggest thing that I want to get better at and I think what I’m improving on. I think all of my, each of my books have become more ambitious than the previous one. I think the thing that I’m working on now is more ambitious than ‘The Vanishing Half’ and I always want to continue to challenge myself to do something different that I don’t know how to do at the time. I don’t want to write ‘The Vanishing Half Part Two’. I want to write something that is going to challenge me and I want to write something that when I sit down and think about it, I think I don’t know how to do this. That’s what I think I have done from book to book and I want to continue doing.

Miller: Brit Bennett. It was a real pleasure talking to you. Thank you.

Bennett: Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Miller: That’s Brit Bennett, the author of ‘The Mothers’ and ‘The Vanishing Half’. Thanks very much to all of the students here at Grant High School, to librarian Paige Battle and to Olivia Jones-Hall at Literary Arts for making this show possible. If you don’t want to miss any of our shows, you can listen on the NPR One app, on Apple podcast or wherever you like to get your podcasts. Thanks very much for tuning in to Think Out Loud on OPB and KLCC. I’m Dave Miller. We’ll be back tomorrow.

Think Out Loud is supported by Steve and Jan Oliva, the Rose E. Tucker Charitable Trust, Ray and Marilyn Johnson and the Susan Hammer Fund of the Oregon Community Foundation.

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