Join us in ten minutes for this fascinating conversation between @britrbennett and @areejnur on The Vanishing Half, racial inequality and the emotional stakes of identity #mwfdigital https://twitter.com/MelbWritersFest/status/1294454073257676801

'I've always been interested in the idea of these identities that are perhaps more ambiguous or are interpreted in these other ways, and what it actually means to choose.' – @britrbennett #mwfdigital

'What does it actually mean to be white, Black or any of those things? I think from a position that those are not fixed and obvious things.' – @britrbennett #mwfdigital

'I am always interested in these small moments that can lead to these huge consequences, and I thought of Stella in this way.' – @britrbennett #mwfdigital

'We can make these small decisions within our own lives
that have unforeseen and large dramatic consequences
that affect not only our lives, but also the lives of those in our families, our children and our relatives that we haven't even met yet.' – @britrbennett #mwfdigital

'There's no way of knowing all those people who have passed. It's like faking your own death. You only know if someone has faked their own death if they do it unsuccessfully.' – @britrbennett #mwfdigital

'There's this very hidden history of these people who have not been discovered in some way, and that that was what I was interested in writing towards – that kind of hidden history of passing.' – @britrbennett #mwfdigital

'Once I started writing it, I realised that I was really interested in writing toward myth and once I started doing that, I think it liberated me.' – @britrbennett #mwfdigital

'I don't even know if fantasy is the right word, but there is something inherently off-kilter about race and particularly race in the context of this book.' – @britrbennett #mwfdigital

'Why is this person white and we're not? And that's a question where there's no answer to it, you know. It's a legitimate question of what and where is that line.' – @britrbennett #mwfdigital

'There are these notions that people have tried to determine to create those sort of boundaries between race, but there's nothing natural and inevitable about it.' – @britrbennett #mwfdigital

'When I think about race sometimes, I'm really firm and I have a real sense of what's going on and then sometimes, it's so fluid that it becomes confusing to even myself, someone who's visibly racialised.' – @areejnur #mwfdigital

'I'm always really interested in seeing people who have taken DNA testing to find out their ethnic breakdown because sometimes people find out things that are very different than what they have always believed about themselves.' – @britrbennett #mwfdigital

'If you're not visibily racialised and you have the option, then these questions become a little bit more complicated but if you are, then that decision is not made by you. It's made by the context in which you're in.' – @areejnur #mwfdigital

'There's this idea of the self being something that is constantly being made and remade and undone.' – @britrbennett #mwfdigital

'We like to assume that when we look at somebody, we can immediately tell their gender, their race, their age. We don't know. We're all guessing.' – @britrbennett #mwfdigital

'There's definitely a greater evolution within language, at least when it comes to thinking beyond those binaries or maybe just complicating the binaries more.' – @britrbennett #mwfdigital

'I still think there are ways in which people can be wedded to these binaries because they're simple and there's something nice about simplicity.' – @britrbennett #mwfdigital

'The binary is real in the sense that that it has these effects on the lives of these characters, and I never wanted to lose sight of that, but at the same time it's a construct. It's something that we have created and uphold.' – @britrbennett #mwfdigital

'Protect baby Jude at all costs. Jude is such a special character to me. She's compassionate, multilayered, and her relationship with Reese shatters this idea of the binary. I loved everything about her.' – @areejnur #mwfdigital

'I wanted to think about the way that Stella and Desiree's lives are shaped by this trauma they witness and not only that, but how they also then pass that on to their children who have both have a very different relationship to that trauma.' – @britrbennett #mwfdigital

'I wanted to write about the two of them in a way that didn't feel judgemental. I didn't want to judge either of them for the choices that they made. I didn't want to moralise.' – @britrbennett #mwfdigital

'I loved the idea of race as a performance, and also a performance in which the scripts are constantly changing for everybody, and in which there are penalties for performing race wrong.' – @britrbennett #mwfdigital

'I couldn't blame Stella for wanting to pass. You think about all of the things in which she has experienced and witnessed, and the narrowness of the life available to her as a Black woman in that time and place.' – @britrbennett #mwfdigital

'These stories of passing are so deeply American, I think, because they relate to our American mythology of creating yourself, and that you can be whoever you want to be.' – @britrbennett #mwfdigital

'But you cannot attain whiteness and you cannot step outside of whatever class in which you have been subjugated to gain more access to privilege. There's this strange contradiction within American mythology.' – @britrbennett #mwfdigital

'The Vanishing Half reminded me of the little things in our personalities and nature that are not necessarily related to our racial makeup or our gender. We are the little things and the big things, and they are equally important.' – @areejnur #mwfdigital

'The Vanishing Half is about these characters loving each other across distance and space and time and I think that's something that we're all dealing with right now.' – @britrbennett #mwfdigital