Bird by Bird, Brick by Brick

I FIRST encountered Danzy Senna’s writing in 1998, when my son came home from Berkeley High School and pulled his assigned summer read, a novel called Caucasia, from his backpack’s messy nest. I devoured it that night and began the wait for more: Senna’s second novel, Symptomatic (2004); her first and only memoir, Where Did You Sleep Last Night? (2009); the short story collection You Are Free (2011); a third novel, New People (2017); and now, the “Hollywood novel” she has “always wanted to write,” Colored Television, out this month from Riverhead Books.

Although she writes in various genres and styles, Senna’s works share some touchstones: her fascination with “messy mulatto women,” her sidesplitting wit, her passion for equality’s dream. Born and raised in Boston to a white mother and Black father, Senna moved to Brooklyn, where she wrote her first book. In 2006, she resolved “the central identity conflict in [her] life,” which had been “New York versus L.A.,” and moved to the latter.

I met Senna 26 years after reading Caucasia, at “Black Hollywood’s top restaurant,” Alta Adams. In the stippled shade of the restaurant’s grape bower, a crowd of book influencers and publishing colleagues sat at long tables digging into hot topics and fried chicken dinners. The guest of honor moved among her fans with grace and humility, signing galleys, talking and laughing with folks she seemed to know and folks she seemed to want to know.

For dessert, along with classic Southern 7-Up cake, we sat in on a conversation between Senna and The Stacks podcaster Traci Thomas about Senna’s sixth, wittiest, and most insightful book yet, Colored Television. In it, we meet ambitious, delusional novelist Jane, her painter husband Lenny, and their two young kids, as the family is about to be evicted again, this time from the Hollywood Hills manse (with unlocked wine cellar) they’re house-sitting for a more successful friend of Jane’s. Jane has vowed that, before their stay is up and they’re cast back into Los Angeles’s mean squats and streets, she will finally finish the novel she thinks of as “the mulatto War and Peace.” The new book’s success, she’s certain, will bring her in from the culture’s cold margins to its sizzling dead center, Hollywood post–George Floyd.

It spoils nothing to say that very little goes to plan. Thanks to Senna’s gift for crafting believable plot twists, woven through with her skilled skewering of Los Angeles’s creative class, the reader’s investment in Jane’s happiness grows, along with Jane’s faith in her own excruciatingly unreachable dreams. Danzy Senna and I continued the conversation via email.

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MEREDITH MARAN: At the party where we met, you seemed pretty relaxed for a writer about to launch a new book. True?

DANZY SENNA: True! This being my sixth book, I’m no longer trying to prove to myself or the world that I’m “a real writer.” I’ve developed filters. I’m not on social media. I don’t follow things too closely. I’ve learned the hard way that you just write the book you want and hope for the best. There’s so much you cannot control. Also, I have teenagers, so they get the bulk of my anxiety!

Your first novel, Caucasia, was a big critical and commercial hit. That can be a good thing and a bad thing for a writer who wants to keep writing. How has that early success affected you?

Before Caucasia was a success, it was a manuscript no one wanted. After it was finished, it took me a year to get an agent. It may be hard to imagine now, but in 1997, Caucasia was met with confusion and bewilderment by the white gatekeepers in publishing. There were no stories being published about mixed-race characters. When I finally published the book, I had reason to believe I would only ever produce that one.

Theory debunked! Talk to me about Symptomatic, your sophomore novel.

On tour with Caucasia, I felt somewhat oppressed by being called a “representative of mixed people.” So I did exactly what my publisher and my agent didn’t want me to do: something weird and edgy. The reviews were bewildered and hostile. Symptomatic was a commercial and critical flop. To survive a big successful debut novel like Caucasia is one thing, but to survive a book that did as poorly as Symptomatic and keep writing, you kind of know you’re a writer and you are going to do this no matter what.

You did keep writing—a memoir, a story collection, and another novel.

Writing Where Did You Sleep Last Night? allowed me to finally put my autobiographical family and childhood stuff to rest and move forward into adult territory. It also let me know I’m not by nature a memoir writer. I feel freer behind the mask of fiction. The stories in You Are Free grappled with female identity—the shift between being single and childless and then having a partner and kids. New People was the most fun to write of all my books, until Colored Television. It was great to have my third novel be received so differently from my second, so well, and to be understood and appreciated. It also touched on the obsession that recurs throughout my work, by which I mean the schism between the East Coast and California.

Talk about that obsession, a.k.a. the city of Los Angeles.

I couldn’t really write in New York. The city was endlessly distracting to me. In New York, I feel like I’m an author, public-facing. In Los Angeles, I’m a writer. L.A. allows you to hide and dream in a way New York doesn’t. I can create in L.A. in a way I can’t anywhere else. I moved west to be with my partner and discovered I was pregnant the week I arrived. I had my children here—two sons, back-to-back—and have written almost all my books here. It’s been a lonely place for me, but L.A. is the most creatively imaginative and productive space. I can create in L.A. in a way I can’t anywhere else.

Have you been able to find or create a writing community for yourself in Los Angeles?

You can’t organically or accidentally create community here. You have to intentionally cultivate it. So I founded a small writers’ group 15 years ago with some writer friends—Dana Johnson, Victoria Patterson, Sarah Shun-lien Bynum. We gather at my dining room table or a café and eat and gossip and talk about each other’s works in progress. I’m only half-joking when I say I wrote New People and Colored Television to entertain my friends around that table.

What are your dreams for Colored Television? How do you hope the publication of your new novel will change your career? The world?

I don’t think about my career as something that needs changing. Maybe to a fault, I’m more interested in art than career. Surviving as an artist in the United States, and especially an artist of color—that feels like the goal. Resilience. You keep making art, bird by bird, brick by brick. I wrote this book under low-key duress with two children, and a few other jobs, and a pandemic, and a complicated life and family and history. To have finished it to my liking feels like I’ve already gotten what I want.

Can you say more about your motivation to keep going, brick by brick, under duress?

I really believe in the populist value of literature—the idea that I might write something filled with complex ideas about race and class and identity and history that readers experience first and foremost as pleasurable to read. I love hearing that the book keeps people up late and they’re laughing, because I believe in that Orwell idea that every joke is a tiny revolution. Fiction is revolutionary, too, because it forces us to enter other bodies and time-travel and become less entrenched in our own chauvinist position and perspective. I’m committed for the long haul. Having a body of work now helps me see that each book is part of this larger lifelong project. And I do believe in that project.

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Featured image: Photo of Danzy Senna © Dustin Snipes.

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