The Vanishing Half
This week we talk about Brit Bennett's beautiful "The Vanishing Half". We are seriously having a tough time figuring out if we have a favourite book so far this series, because this one is yet another INCREDIBLE addition.
The girls get into:
- The choices a person makes being a product of how they were taught as children
- The contrast between running away from yourself vs becoming who you want to be
- How we're just finding SO MUCH RACISM buried in ourselves (it's deeply upsetting)
- and outside expectation and how it can mess with a person
Oh and the tangents? Well...
- a VERY bare-bones run down of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine interim data review results and how excited we all are
- Chloe giving some very sound advice re: sending nudes
- Cliodhna's on-air imaginary date with Lupita N'yongo (no seriously)
- Mario Kart being the video game of choice to get the shift during
- And of course, your standard CL4L BTS update (including, Yoongi's recent surgery, the lack of white-washing in the latest batch of promo photos and how we're HERE FOR IT, and, y'know, JK sending Chloe secret messages through his BE concept photo)
Catch the full episode
More on The Vanishing Half:
The Vignes twin sisters will always be identical. But after growing up together in a small, southern black community and running away at age sixteen, it's not just the shape of their daily lives that is different as adults, it's everything: their families, their communities, their racial identities. Many years later, one sister lives with her black daughter in the same southern town she once tried to escape. The other secretly passes for white, and her white husband knows nothing of her past. Still, even separated by so many miles and just as many lies, the fates of the twins remain intertwined. What will happen to the next generation, when their own daughters' storylines intersect?
Weaving together multiple strands and generations of this family, from the Deep South to California, from the 1950s to the 1990s, Brit Bennett produces a story that is at once a riveting, emotional family story and a brilliant exploration of the American history of passing. Looking well beyond issues of race, The Vanishing Half considers the lasting influence of the past as it shapes a person's decisions, desires, and expectations, and explores some of the multiple reasons and realms in which people sometimes feel pulled to live as something other than their origins.
As with her New York Times-bestselling debut The Mothers, Brit Bennett offers an engrossing page-turner about family and relationships that is immersive and provocative, compassionate and wise.
For more on Brit Bennet, visit