The Vanishing Half is a fascinating read and I highly recommend it. It is a novel about how identity is constructed. The central focus of The Vanishing Half is racial identity. It is about the Vignes sisters, identical twins Desiree and Stella, one of whom lives as a black woman while the other lives as a white woman and follows their lives through the decades spanning the 1950s to the early 1990s.

Desiree and Stella are from a small black community called Mallard in Louisiana, a community constructed by people who pride themselves on the lightness of their skin. Their skin colour might not be white, but they identify as being superior to dark-skinned African Americans. The Vignes twins are warned by their mother not to marry a “dark man”, which Desiree ends up doing after she and Stella run away from home at sixteen. Desiree returns home to Mallard many years later with her dark-skinned daughter, Jude, in tow. The darkness of Jude’s skin is constantly referenced throughout the novel and her identity is constructed around it. Who cares that she grows up to be an intelligent woman who goes to medical school? People, both black and white, just can’t seem to see past her blackness and look down on her because of it.

Stella is the twin who cuts ties with her family to live as a white woman. She marries a white man and has a blonde-haired daughter. No one suspects she is not white, not even other African Americans. She behaves as a white woman is expected to behave at the time in the 1960s and 1970s: she does not associate with African American people, she protests against an African American family moving into her white neighbourhood, and she even, uncomfortably, uses the “N” word.

Stella is a complex character that I’m not sure how to feel about. I can’t help but think, how can she turn her back on her mother and her twin sister? How can she not be true to who she really is? Which, I know, is easy for a white person to think. Even though Stella has constructed an identity for herself as a white woman, she is never comfortable living in a white world. She lives in constant fear of being found out as a fraud and what it would do to her marriage and her relationship with her daughter if they ever found out she is black. It’s frustrating that this is the world we live in, that even today the colour of a person’s skin is still an issue that can break up families, among other things. We are more than just the skin we live in.

Although the central focus of The Vanishing Half is race, gender identity also plays a role. There is a fascinating secondary character that Jude meets, a transgender man who is successfully able to construct his own identity and be comfortable with the life he lives. I also enjoyed reading about the relationship that develops between Jude and this character because they appreciate each other when other people do not appreciate them. Again, why is gender identity still an issue? We are more than just the parts we were born with.