There was a rule to which Brit Bennett adhered during the writing of her novel The Vanishing Half. But it was an essay written by Bennett in Jezebel two years earlier that first vaulted her to public attention. As Bennett’s mother, who came from a family of sharecroppers in rural Louisiana, used to say: “It was a lot simpler in the rural South. Does Bennett see the US, in the aftermath of Trump, as a country effectively still in shock from the recent past? “I saw an article today: ‘Where has Trump gone?’” Bennett laughs.

Source: The Guardian May 15, 2021 10:52 UTC