The novel is set in Louisiana and tells the story of two sisters who get separated and went on to become very different people. As such, “The Vanishing Half” which is her second novel was inspired by this fascination with the period. As a person with a lot of interest is social issues particularly to do with the black community, she was also interested in the Jim Crow era. The conviction and passion of the young teenagers in her community was always a conundrum and her questions for this soon metastasized into an idea for a story that would be about the entire community in her debut novel “The Mothers”. There was a feeling of an outsider looking in as she felt she had questions she could not explore or raise as she believed that it was not right to have doubts. As a teen, she attended church but had a lot of questions about faith and religion and thought that compared to the people in her society she had too many doubts. Given her upbringing, she had a strong interest in the lives of church-going teenagers who seemed to have more devotion in matters of religion. She has said that she was inspired to write the novel and set it mostly in a black community given that she grew up in the church. It is set in Southern California in a community that evokes the settings that the author grew in. Since then, her work has been featured in several publications such as “The Brian Lehrer show in NPR,” “The New York Times Magazine,” “The Paris Review,” and “The New Yorker.”īennett’s first novel “The Mothers” is a compelling story of young love. She had her huge break with “I Don’t Know What to Do With Good White People,” an essay that she published in “Jezebel” that had over a million shares. In the years preceding the publishing of her first novel “The Mothers,” she had built an impressive brand as a social commentator working for some of the biggest publications in the United States. Golden Thesis and the Guerard/Bocock prize that she got as an undergraduate at Stanford. It was at the latter institution where she won the Wright/Hurston award for College Writers in 2014 and the Hopwood Award in Graduate Fiction. As a teenager, she went to Sanford University and later attended the University of Michigan where she got her MFA in creative fiction. It was a conservative town that is pervaded with military culture, though she has always felt an inside out dynamic as her family was not a military one. Oceanside exposed her to a lot of different cultures as it was a racially diverse town with a beach that had people from all socioeconomic backgrounds vacationing there. Brit Bennett is a literary fiction author born and raised in Oceanside in North San Diego County in South California.

Butterball by Brit Bennett