23, Deadline announced poet and playwright Barnes and playwright Harris would be taking on writing and executive producer duties, with Rae and Allain joining Bennett as executive producers. The creative team is in place but no casting has been announced. So what does it mean to be outside of that binary? And then, what does it mean to leave that town? I was interested in the idea that this liminal third space was mobile, that it was something the characters carried with them even when they left the town and went off to other places.” “In the Jim Crow society, it’s all about the binaries. “I wanted to write a book about a town that exists in this weird liminal racial space between the worlds of black and white, in a time and a place in which binaries are very important,” she told the outlet. What will happen to the next generation, when their own daughters’ storylines intersect?'īennett, who is also the author of bestselling novel The Mothers, spoke to Vulture about her inspiration for The Vanishing Half.

Still, even separated by so many miles and just as many lies, the fates of the twins remain intertwined. The other secretly passes for white, and her white husband knows nothing of her past. Many years later, one sister lives with her Black daughter in the same southern town she once tried to escape. 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. A further description of the novel, per Penguin Random House, reads: The Vignes twin sisters will always be identical. It tells the story of Desiree and Stella Vignes, identical twin sisters who grew up in the Jim Crow South before escaping at 16 and diverging on separate life paths. The source material for HBO's new limited series is Bennett's epic 2020 novel. The Vanishing Half explores themes of race, family, and identity. Ahead, everything we know about the highly-anticipated TV series.

The vanishing half book