A single sentence britrbennett's mother said in passing inspired her new book and a bidding war in Hollywood
Aug. 25 for a virtual meet-up, knew immediately that her mother’s story was the doorway to a larger story she wanted to explore. “It felt big and expansive.”is an elegant multi-generational portrait of the deep fissures within a family cleaved by the choices twin sisters — Desiree and Stella — make when they break away. What they find, Bennett writes early in the narrative, “You can escape a town but you can not escape blood.
But it was Stella, the younger twin, whose story bedeviled Bennett. The character cuts all ties with her past and decides “to pass” — to live as a white woman. “There is an evasiveness to her,” Bennett says. “I wanted to lean into that mystery and into the things that were entrancing and confounding.”
More compelling, Bennett observes, the transgression redefines the category of whiteness as being “precious” and that by “sort of stealing it” you deserve to be punished. She asked herself: “Should a character be punished for slipping into this social category thatBennett knew that she was writing into a storied literary tradition — memoirs, novels, screenplays and scholarly works that explore entire branches of families that vanished into ether and out of memory.
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