FREE OF CHARGE LIVESTREAM EVENT
Friday, July 24, 2020
5:00 PM PDT
Watch the conversation here:
To join this livestream, please register here. You will receive a confirmation with a link to join the livestream via Zoom. We encourage registrants to check their system requirements early and download the Zoom app to avoid any connection issues.
After you register, we will follow up with email instructions on how to redeem your ticket and access the event.
We recommend you to purchase a copy of The Vanishing Half from our partner, Eso Won Books here. These copies will have signed book plates.
In conversation with Kara Brown.
The Vanishing Half, the new and great bestselling novel by the writer Brit Bennett, asks us to think about the complexities and depths of racial identity, whether in an individual, a family, a town, or a people. This is a most extraordinary novel about the concept of passing for white when Black.
We’ve read novels about passing for white before (Philip Roth’s The Human Stain, for one), but The Vanishing Half occupies a sphere all its own. Twin sisters, both light-skinned Black girls have been taught the virtues–and cultural necessity– of lightness. Lightness is their ticket out of poverty, out of what they’ve been dealt– but of course it’s a lot more complicated than that. Bennett’s twins are tethered to each other throughout their youth, but as one sister vanishes to lead a very separate life from her twin, we explore how they manage their legacy of lightness, one in the Deep South and one in leafy Brentwood, how they juggle their secrets, their lies, their concepts of who they are. This multi-generational novel is jarring, painful, and profoundly haunting.
Kara Brown is a writer who has covered pop culture for many journals, including Glamour, Jezebel, Time, Nylon, and more. She also writes for television (grown-ish), and was a podcast host for Crooked Media’s Keep It. One of her proudest moments was when she learned that Ta-Nehisi Coates name-checked her for a piece he wrote for The Atlantic.