The Vanishing Half Summary

Desiree and Stella are identical twins. They grow up in Mallard, Louisiana, a town that consists entirely of light-skinned Black people. It’s frowned upon in Mallard to marry dark-skinned people, since everyone has colorist ideas and values light skin tones. Although the Black people of Mallard have carved out a space for themselves, they still live under the constant threat of racism—as made clear by the fact that Leon Vignes, Desiree and Stella’s father, is brutally murdered by a racist mob of angry white men. This experience binds the twins together in their trauma.

Desiree and Stella are very close. Desiree is bold and independent, whereas Stella is shy and reserved. In their sophomore year of high school, Stella spends her free time teaching younger students. She’s extremely smart, dreaming of someday going to college. But her dream falls flat when her mother, Adele, takes her and Desiree out of school and sends them to work as housecleaners for a rich white family in the neighboring town of Opelousas. Unbeknownst to Desiree and Adele, the father of this rich family sexually abuses Stella. She doesn’t say anything about it, but the traumatic experience is enough to make her go along with Desiree’s idea for them to run away to New Orleans. At the end of the summer, the twins set out on the night of the Founder’s Day dance, when everyone in town is preoccupied.

In New Orleans, Desiree and Stella find work in a laundromat, though they’re not technically old enough to have jobs. One day, Stella isn’t paying attention and almost gets her hand caught in the laundry press. Her boss fires her for her carelessness, making it hard for Desiree and Stella to survive on their own. But this event doesn’t make Stella want to go home—in fact, whenever Desiree floats the idea of returning to Mallard, Stella subtly convinces her to stay. The twins need to make enough money to survive, so Desiree shows Stella a job listing for a good position as a secretary at a marketing firm in a fancy building called the Maison Blanche. Stella would make a good secretary, but the sisters know that no company in the Maison Blanche would ever hire a Black woman. Accordingly, Desiree tells Stella not to mention that she’s Black. Stella isn’t sure at first, but she goes along with the idea and ends up getting the job.

In the Maison Blanche building, Stella works for Blake Sanders, a good-looking white man. He takes an interest in her and asks her out to lunch. Once they’ve grown close, Blake gets a new job in Boston and asks Stella to come with him. She knows going with him would mean permanently stepping into the life of a white woman—which, in turn, would mean severing ties with Desiree and everyone else from her past. But the idea excites her, so she agrees. She slips away without saying goodbye to Desiree, merely leaving her a note saying that she has to go her own way.

Fourteen years later, Desiree returns to Mallard. After Stella disappeared, she moved to Washington, D.C. because she couldn’t bear living in a city that reminded her of her twin. She worked in D.C. as a fingerprint analyst and met Sam, a dark-skinned Black man who eventually became her husband. They were deeply in love and had a daughter named Jude, but then Sam became physically abusive. After several years, Desiree decided to run away with her daughter, fearing what Sam might do if they stayed. She goes back to Mallard and seeks shelter in her mother’s house, though Adele makes it clear that she doesn’t approve of the decision Desiree made to marry a dark-skinned man. Jude hates living in Mallard, since she’s the only dark-skinned person in town. Everyone at school bullies her and calls her racist names, so she focuses on running, which is the only thing she enjoys.

Meanwhile, Desiree reignites a romance with a man named Early, who lived for a short while on the outskirts of Mallard as a teenager. Unlike the town’s other residents, Early doesn’t have light skin, so Adele never wanted Desiree to spend time with him. After catching them together on the front porch one night, she chased Early away and he never came back—until he travels to Mallard as an adult to find Desiree. Sam hired him to find Desiree, since Early works as a bounty hunter. But when Early actually finds Desiree, he learns that she ran away because Sam was abusive. He promises not to tell Sam where she went. And as Early and Desiree rekindle their romantic feelings, he also offers to look for Stella. They go to New Orleans together and learn that she moved to Boston when she initially disappeared. In the coming years, Early makes an effort to piece together Stella’s path while also continuing to take other bounty hunting jobs. When he’s not on the road, he comes back to Mallard and stays with Desiree. Try as he might, though, he doesn’t find Stella.

Jude attends college at UCLA on a running scholarship. Feeling out of place at a party one night, she talks to a man named Reese. Originally from Arkansas, Reese is a Black photographer living in Los Angeles. He and Jude become very close, though it takes a while for them to act on their romantic feelings. Reese tells Jude that he’s trans. He asks Jude what she thinks about his transition, and she says that it doesn’t strike her as surprising or unheard of—she has always felt that it’s possible to be “two different people in one lifetime.” Once they finally start a romantic relationship, Jude is a little taken aback by Reese’s unwillingness to take off his clothes in front of her. She tells him he doesn’t have to wrap his chest, which makes him angry—he doesn’t do it for her. They have their first real fight, but they soon make up, and Reese tells Jude that he’s saving for top surgery (a gender-affirming surgery to give him the chest he wants). The problem, though, is that the surgery is very expensive.

Jude gets a new job as a caterer to help Reese save for surgery. While she’s catering a party for rich white people, a young blond woman named Kennedy starts talking to her about how her own mother hasn’t yet arrived at the party, which is for her father. As Jude opens a bottle of wine, Kennedy’s mother finally strides into the party, much to the surprise of Jude, who drops the wine bottle on an expensive rug—the woman who walks in is Stella.

Stella has been living in a wealthy housing development in Los Angeles with Blake and their daughter, Kennedy. She was worried when she first got pregnant that her child would have dark skin, but Kennedy’s skin is even lighter than Stella’s. Stella practically never interacts with Black people these days, but that wasn’t the case when Kennedy was young and a Black family, the Walkers, moved into the house across the street. Everyone in the neighborhood was enraged that the Homeowners Association allowed a Black family to move in. Even Stella voiced strong disapproval, but the family threatened to sue the Association if it blocked their purchase of the house. Stella feared that the Black family would sense that she, too, is Black. However, she ended up secretly befriending Loretta Walker, the wife and mother of the new family. She enjoyed spending time with Loretta, who reminded her of Desiree. But her white friends started talking about her friendship with Loretta, which she’d been keeping secret from Blake. What’s more, Kennedy called Loretta’s daughter the n-word, saying she didn’t want to play with Black people. Loretta said Kennedy must have picked up this racism from Stella and Blake, so she cut ties with Stella. Stella then lied to her white friends by saying that Reginald Walker once looked at her in a sexually charged way. Several days later, people started throwing bricks through the Walkers’ windows, prompting them to move away for their own safety.

After Jude sees Stella at the fancy party, she obsesses over tracking her down again. By a stroke of luck, her friend, Barry, is cast in a musical in which Kennedy plays the lead, so Jude meets her once again. To get closer to Kennedy, she gets a job at the theater as an usher. The two cousins become friendly acquaintances. Every night, Jude hopes Stella will be in the audience, but Kennedy tells her that Stella won’t be there because she disapproves of Kennedy’s acting career. Instead of acting, Stella wants her daughter to go to college. She was enrolled at USC but dropped out to become an actress—something Stella thinks is ridiculous. Finally, on the night of the final performance, Stella comes to the show. Jude talks to her outside at intermission. She reveals that she’s Desiree’s daughter, but Stella clearly isn’t open to the idea of reconnecting. She hurries away, missing the second half of Kennedy’s show. At the cast party that night, Kennedy is upset because she thinks her mother didn’t come to the musical. She makes a racist comment to Jude about how Black men like Reese usually like light-skinned women, not dark-skinned women like Jude. Offended, Jude tells Kennedy the truth about Stella (that she’s actually Black) and then leaves the bar.

Although Stella denies Jude’s claims, Kennedy remains suspicious, sensing that Jude is telling the truth. She brings up Stella’s past frequently, but Stella keeps lying. After a while, Kennedy moves to New York to continue acting. As luck would have it, she runs into Jude and Reese in New York, since they’ve come to the city for Reese’s top surgery. Jude gives Kennedy a photograph of their mothers as little girls, and finally Kennedy knows the truth. But when she goes back to Los Angeles and shows the picture to Stella, her mother still lies by saying she’s not in the photograph. Enraged, Kennedy leaves and decides to travel the world to “find” herself. Meanwhile, Stella returns to Mallard with the intention of asking Desiree to tell Jude to stop contacting her daughter. When she gets there, she discovers that Adele is suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. Her reunion with Desiree is strained at first, since Desiree doesn’t want to forgive her. But the sisters eventually embrace and revel in each other’s presence, sharing a bottle of gin on the front porch of their childhood home and talking about the past. The next day, Stella slips away without saying goodbye, returning to her life with Blake in Los Angeles.

Soon after Stella leaves, Adele dies. Jude—who’s attending medical school in Minneapolis—returns to Mallard with Reese, who feels like he finally has the male body he has always wanted. As for Desiree, she leaves Mallard once again, moving to Houston, Texas with Early, who works in a refinery while she works at a call center.