Writer Brit Bennett has had a phenomenal year due of the release of her 2020 book, The Vanishing Half. The novel made Barack Obama's '' list, it has spent 36 weeks on New York Times bestseller list, and was part of a fierce bidding auction for film rights - which HBO landed in . To top it off, last week Bennett made the cover of Time magazine as part of their 'TIME100 2021 Next' list.
Fellow author Tayari Jones, who introduces Bennett in Time : "Bennett is informed and inspired by the intensities and complexities of our present moment. If race is a construct, what about gender? What are the limits of self-definition? How can one delineate its wages and costs?"
Bennett herself , The Vanishing Half is: "a story about twin sisters, Desiree and Stella, who decide to live their lives on opposite sides of the colour line – one as a white woman and one as a black woman."
But such a brief description doesn't do justice to the impact the novel has had.
Bennett herself believes the book's success is due to the fact that people are more keen to learn about race than ever before. "It explores racial identity at a time when people are really eager to read and engage with conversations about that," she said in The Guardian.
As Black Lives Matters (BLM) protests took place all over the world, so did a renewed interested in reading books on racism, many of which have .
Back in June last year, the number one and two bestselling books on Amazon were about racism.
It wasn't just books. An interest in learning more about racism and white privilege lead to a spike in such terms being searched on the internet. In Australia, questions like 'what is white privilege?' in the month that BLM protests hit our streets.
Bennett's book it seems, captured the zeitgeist and hit the shelves at a time when people were beginning to question the impact of racism on a global scale.
But reading about books on racism isn't enough. As Ijeoma Oluo, the author of So You Want to Talk About Race tweeted: "I am happy people are reading my book. But if you read my book and think ‘oh - now I understand racism!’ You have a lot more books to read."
Bennett however has a different perspective, wanting her book to be more about the story than the race aspect. "There’s this framing of it as an anti-racist text," . "But I’m not an educator. I’m just telling a story about these people and their choices, so it’s strange to be swept up in this discourse.”
She is also a little cynical about the interest in reading about racism by the wider public. "It was like people baking banana bread,” she said in her LA Times interview. “Oh, now we’re learning how to bake sourdough, and now we’re learning about race. ... and then the next thing happens. I hope that I am wrong. I hope that doesn’t happen. That it doesn’t just drift by."
Regardless, the book has placed 31-year-old Bennett firmly in the limelight. Aside from her HBO deal, the screenplay she wrote for her debut novel The Mothers was optioned by the actress Kerry Washington, and she is currently at work on her next novel about two feuding singers.
While Bennett's career looks like it's firmly on an upwards trajectory, the hope for authors like her writing about race is that the book buying public doesn't lose its appetite for books on race and racism, because this is a fertile topic that is definitely worth educating yourself on.
