Words Wednesday is a weekly tag (created by me!) where each week you share a word, quote, or phrase that you’ve come across over the course of the week. Content can be from books, movies, songs, or even you’re really wise and poetic friend. If you want to participate, share your post in the comments and I’ll feature your post in next weeks WW.
Quote of the Week
“The only difference between lying and acting was whether your audience was in on it, but it was all a performance just the same.”
The Vanishing Half, by Brit Bennett
The Vanishing Half is yet another book I’m currently reading that everyone else in the world read two years ago. It’s about a set of twins who are racially ambiguous and end up taking very different paths in life. One sister, Stella, chooses to abandon her family and live her life as white, and the other sister, Desiree, chooses to live her life as black. This causes them to live extraordinarily different lives. This book powerfully speaks to the fact that although race is a social construct, it truly impacts every part of the way we live.
At the point of the book where I’m at right now, I’ve spent the majority of my time in Desiree’s head, and this is a quote from her. She was making a point to say that she was a good liar, and would occasionally pretend to be her sister growing up. She’d wanted to be in the school play, and when she lost the opportunity to a girl whose dad was a major donor for the school, this was all of the acting opportunity she had left.
Although I do NOT condone lying, I do relate to the urge to lie to random, inconsequential people about random, inconsequential things. Like telling the random man sitting next to me on the airplane that I work in publishing when I very much do not. I like the way Bennett chose to have her character describe her lying, because it made her so much more relatable as a character and gave us a motivation for her unimportant lies. Desiree was never lying when it actually mattered (in contrast with other characters in the novel) and so for her, lying to people that were irrelevant to her life really was a form of acting. Small details like this quote can do so much to make a character relatable and add layers to her character that weren’t there before.
In case you weren’t aware, the title of this post “Lying’s the most fun a girl can have”, is a Panic! At The Disco lyric. This lyric was taken from Natalie Portman’s character in Closer, but i’ve never seen that so I don’t have anything to say about it. I am, however, a huge fan of the band, and they have absolutely nothing to do with the book or the quote (the song lyrics follow up with “without taking her clothes off”, a sentiment I highly doubt Desiree was feeling), but I couldn’t resist using it. Titles are hard guys!
Write Through the Night 