Hello everyone,
Last weekend was a sunny one in London and it made me so happy! I’m enjoying the longer days and the promise of spring.
This week’s post is dedicated to my lovely friend Erin.
Have a great week!
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Why did I read this book?
My friend and colleague Erin started sharing book recommendations with me last year. We spoke a few weeks ago and she told me I had to listen to The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett. A superb recommendation!
What is the book about?
Identical twin sisters with very different lives: The Vignes sisters escape their hometown at the age of sixteen. Shortly after that, their lives go in completely opposite directions in a way that neither of them could have foreseen. The story follows the twins’ paths from the 1950s to the 1990s, allowing the reader to witness their life, love, and family choices and their inevitable impact.
Navigating Identity: What are the traits that make us who we are? Is it something that we’re born with? Is it the decisions we make along the way? Is it a bit of both? Is our identity dictated from the inside or from the outside? This book explores these questions in-depth, emphasizing the weight societies tend to place on our backgrounds (economic, racial, sexual identity and gender, etc.) to define who we can be.
Escaping destiny: for many of us, certain birth circumstances (birthplace, skin colour, sex at birth, etc.) will automatically dictate certain defaults in life. What happens when someone decides to change “the cards they were dealt with” and tries to go down a different path? How do you reconcile the forces that push you away from your family but pull you into another life that you dreamed of?
“That was the thrill of youth, the idea that you could be anyone. That was what had captured her in the charm shop, all those years ago. Then adulthood came, your choices solidifying, and you realize that everything you are had been set in motion years before. The rest was aftermath.”
― Brit Bennett, The Vanishing Half
Why should you read it?
If you’re looking for a page-turner: I couldn’t put this book down, all I wanted to do was to finish work so I could continue listening and find out what happened next. The writing is excellent. The plot is astute and profound. I found myself desperately wanting to know more about the characters, and the author exceeded my expectations. I listened to the audiobook and found it fantastic.
If you want to challenge your conception of what racial identity means: The author surfaces conventional racial constructs in the most clever way: one of the twins lives her life as a black woman and the other one as a white woman. How different could their lives be?
It’s becoming a TV series: As you know, books are always better than their screen adaptations... so, hurry up and read the book before the series spoils all the fun!
“Nobody stopped her, and again, she’d felt stupid for not trying sooner. There was nothing to being white except boldness. You could convince anyone you belonged somewhere if you acted like you did.”
― Brit Bennett, The Vanishing Half
Links to buy the book
Always try to support your local bookshop instead of using Amazon :-) If you’d like me to add any bookshops to the list, let me know.
UK
Amazon UK (Audible)
Spain
Mexico
Gandhi (Libro electrónico)
Italy
US
Favourite quotes
//The purpose of this section is to share some of my favourite book bits, so you can come back to them when you finish a book, if you wish to do so. I’ve put in bold my favourite ones, in case you want to read a few (or all) ahead of the book.//
“Naturally, the truth was neither sinister nor mystical.”
“Being half lost was worse than being fully lost—it was impossible to know which part of you knew the way.”
“A town always looked different once you’d returned, like a house where all the furniture had shifted three inches. You wouldn’t mistake it for a stranger’s house but you’d keep banging your shins on the table corners.”
“Sometimes who you were came down to the small things.”
“The key to staying lost was to never love anything.”
“But then Desiree felt hated and Stella felt ignored. That was the problem: you could never love two people the exact same way. Her blessing had been doomed from the beginning, her girls impossible to please as jealous gods.”
“Well, you got to think about money,” Desiree said. “That’s how all grown folks are.”
“A hurt bird always returns to its nest, a hurting woman no different.”
“She was, in a way, like Stella. Private, like if she told you anything about herself, she was giving away something she could never get back.”
“You could find just about anybody if you were good at lying, he told her. Half of hunting was pretending to be somebody else, an old friend searching for his buddy’s address, a long lost nephew trying to find his uncle’s new phone number, a father inquiring about the whereabouts of his son. There was always someone close to the mark that you could manipulate. Always a window in if you couldn’t find a door.”
“What could be better than being eighteen and in love? Oh, you don’t even know. If I could go back, I’d do everything different.”
“This big ol’ world and we only get to go through it once. The saddest thing there is, you ask me.”
“You could never know who might hurt you until it was too late.”
“Nobody stopped her, and again, she’d felt stupid for not trying sooner. There was nothing to being white except boldness. You could convince anyone you belonged somewhere if you acted like you did.”
“This was comfort, no longer wanting anything.”
“She hadn’t realized how long it takes to become somebody else, or how lonely it can be living in a world not meant for you.”
“Loretta said that, a couple months ago, Cindy asked her what assassination meant. She told her the truth, of course—that an assassination is when someone kills you to make a point. Which was correct enough, Stella supposed, but only if you were an important man. Important men became martyrs, unimportant ones victims. The important men were given televised funerals, public days of mourning. Their deaths inspired the creation of art and the destruction of cities. But unimportant men were killed to make the point that they were unimportant—that they were not even men—and the world continued on.”
“She hadn’t adopted a disguise or even a new name. She’d walked in a colored girl and left a white one. She had become white only because everyone thought she was.”
“The hardest part about becoming someone else was deciding to. The rest was only logistics.”
“Improbable events happened all the time, she tried to explain to her students, because improbability is an illusion based on our preconceptions. Often it has nothing to do with statistical truth.”
“It doesn’t matter what’s already rolled,” she finally told him, exasperated. “Each number is equally likely if the dice are fair. Which they’re not.”
“For most people, the heart decided, not the mind.”“A hurt bird always returns to its nest, a hurting woman no different.”
“Why can’t you just be yourself?” Stella asked once.
“Maybe I don’t know who that is,” her daughter shot back. And Stella understood, she did. That was the thrill of youth, the idea that you could be anyone. That was what had captured her in the charm shop, all those years ago. Then adulthood came, your choices solidifying, and you realize that everything you are had been set in motion years before. The rest was aftermath. So she understood why her daughter was searching for a self, and she even blamed herself for it.”
“If nakedness would not reveal who you were, then what would?”
“He was straining against his white briefs and she felt embarrassed for him, embarrassed for all men, really, forced to wear their desire so openly. She could think of nothing more horrifying than not being able to hide what she wanted.”
“But sometimes lying was an act of love. Stella had spent too long lying to tell the truth now, or maybe, there was nothing left to reveal. Maybe this was who she had become.”
“Strange that the greatest compliment an actress could receive was that she had disappeared into somebody else. Acting is not about being seen, a drama teacher told her once. True acting meant becoming invisible so that only the character shone through.”
“But his taste in white girls was varied and she couldn’t decide what was worse, to be the latest iteration in a series of familiar lovers or to be radically different from the ones who’d come before her. Belonging to a pattern was safe, at least; to be singular was a risk.”
“There were many ways to be alienated from someone, few to actually belong.”
“Like leaving, the hardest part of returning was deciding to.”
“The language bothered Stella most of all. You didn’t just find a self out there waiting—you had to make one. You had to create who you wanted to be. And wasn’t her daughter already doing that?”
“Of course by then, Early knew well enough how little men were willing to die or kill for.”
“She glanced toward the dark woods and nodded. He led Stella to his car. He offered to drive her, not out of kindness, but because Desiree loved Stella and that was how love worked, wasn’t it? A transference, leaping onto you if you inched close enough.”
“Some things you could never learn about yourself—some things nobody could learn about you until after you died.”
“That was the thing about death. Only the specifics of it hurt. Death, in a general sense, was background noise. She stood in the silence of it.”
“Her death hit in waves. Not a flood, but water lapping steadily at her ankles.
You could drown in two inches of water. Maybe grief was the same.”
“People thought that being one of a kind made you special. No, it just made you lonely. What was special was belonging with someone else.”
“When you married someone, you promised to love every person he would be. He promised to love every person she had been. And here they were, still trying, even though the past and the future were both mysteries.”
“A body could be labeled but a person couldn’t, and the difference between the two depended on that muscle in your chest. That beloved organ, not sentient, not aware, not feeling, just pumping along, keeping you alive.”
“In the dark, you could never be too black. In the dark, everyone was the same color.”
“Gratitude only emphasized the depth of your lack, so she tried to hide it.”
“Blake’s colleagues viewed intelligence as a means to an end, and the end was always making more money. But in the mathematics department at Santa Monica College, no one expected to be rich. It was enough to know. She was lucky to spend her days like this, knowing.”
“Being white wasn’t the most exciting part. Being anyone else was the thrill. To transform into a different person in plain sight, nobody around her even able to tell. She’d never felt so free.”