Danzy Senna Discusses ‘Colored Television’

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Danzy Senna Discusses ‘******** Television’

Long before Zendaya was our biggest young movie star, before the Kardashians became an aesthetic and economic juggernaut and certainly before Barack Obama (let alone Kamala Harris) ascended the political ranks, the novelist Danzy Senna predicted we’d soon be living through

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“Strange to wake up and realize you’re in style. That’s what happened to me just the other morning,” she wrote in a 1998 essay. “I realized that, according to the ******* zodiac, 2000 is the official Year of the ********. Pure breeds (at least ****** ones) are out; hybridity is in. America loves us in all of our half-caste glory.”

Droll, insouciant, provocative? Of course — Danzy Senna wrote it. Over nearly three decades, she has spun up hilarious (and occasionally unsettling) stories about the lives of characters who happen to be multiracial — “the country I come from,” as she put it. Her debut novel, “Caucasia,” also published in 1998, followed two biracial sisters born in 1970s Boston who are separated by their parents and whose lives take very different paths. It was a best seller.

Her latest book, “******** Television,” her sixth, satirizes Hollywood, academia, the publishing industry, the housing market, ambition and, not least, the pervasive trope of the tragic ********.

It is also very, very funny.

Like much of Senna’s fiction, “******** Television,” which Riverhead will release on Tuesday, borrows elements from her own life and torques them to the extreme. The novel follows Jane Gibson, a biracial novelist in Los Angeles married to a brilliant, slightly **** painter named Lenny and their two young children.

On its face, the family resembles the beautiful, beige family Jane used to idolize from a Hanna Andersson catalog.

A shared sense of humor — particularly about the absurdity of living in the ******* States as people of ****** — is a refuge in their unstable, uncertain existence. In one scene, Jane tells Lenny, playfully, that he looks “dignified and articulate” in a yellow polo shirt.

Lenny snorted a laugh. “That’s the most ******* thing you’ve ever said to me.”
“Okay. Eloquent and Du Boisian. Is that better?”
“Now you’re scaring me.”

Financial security ******** elusive. Lenny’s paintings are inspired but don’t sell, and it’s been nearly a decade since Jane published a book. But when her family stays in the sophisticated home of one of her friends, a fellow “mixed nut” with literary inclinations who struck gold as a TV showrunner and is temporarily living abroad, Jane is sure she can finish the manuscript she’s been wrestling for years — what Lenny calls her “******** ‘War and Peace’.”

Jane’s ambitious, deeply researched novel ends up a bloated story called “Nusu Nusu,” a Swahili phrase meaning “partly-partly.” Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson appear, as do Slash from Guns n’ Roses and the Melungeons of Appalachia, a historical, sequestered community of mixed-race Americans.

You don’t need to work in publishing to anticipate that the project is ***** on arrival.

Desperate, Jane turns to television writing, shopping around a half-baked idea for what turns into “the Jackie Robinson of biracial comedies.” Along the way, she grapples with questions of passing (both ******* and economic), commodification and self-exploitation.

Like Jane, Senna has dabbled in screenwriting and adaptations, and drew on her experience with that world to write the book.

During an interview in June at the Huntington library and botanical gardens in Pasadena, Calif., where she wrote much of “******** Television,” Senna recalled one such project. Her collaborators loved everything she did. “It was Hollywood hyperbole, which, if you’re a novelist, you’re not used to,” she said. “Completely overnight, I became a monster.”

When that fever broke, “I suddenly had a moment of thinking it would be funny to put a novelist who’s down on her luck into this world,” Senna went on. The setup allowed her to play with tokenism in the entertainment industry, giving Jane the urgency to be “the ******** of the month” in the eyes of Hollywood power brokers, and Senna an outlet to air increasingly screwball conceits (i.e., Labradoodles as cultural emancipators).

Senna, 53, was born in Boston, the daughter of a white, patrician mother descended from some of Massachusetts’ oldest families and an ******** ********* father. Her parents, Fanny Howe and Carl Senna, were in the first cohort of ************ couples who could legally marry in the ******* States.

They were also part of Boston’s literary scene — he an editor and scholar, she a celebrated poet and novelist — and separated when Senna and her two siblings were children. Despite her mother’s pedigree, the family was short on money, and Senna and her father often had a charged relationship. Aside from her disappointment in him as a parent, she found his behavior doubly crushing because he had once been held up as a burgeoning intellectual star.

“Gone was the ‘****** of exceptional promise,’” Senna wrote in her 2009 memoir, “and in its stead he lived up to all the stereotypes that his fellow Americans had ever secretly or not-so-secretly harbored about ****** men.”

Both of her parents were politically engaged in civil rights and the family talked openly and resolutely about race.

“For both of my parents, it was very clear to them we were going to identify as ****** — in a city as ******* as Boston, in a country as ******* as America, that the identity in us that needed protecting and shoring up was our ****** identity,” Senna has said. “It wasn’t the white side of us.”

Part of this frankness about race was a stream of “endless comedy” in the house, Senna said, with no regard for ******. “The sad, woebegone mixed figure in literature was the source of the greatest humor.” She names her father among her biggest comic influences.

Senna jokes that she’s lost count of the number of dinner parties she’s “ruined” by outing herself as a ****** woman, after listening to white guests speak disparagingly of other races.

The actor Wade Allain-Marcus said that experiences like these helped to hone Senna’s observational skills as a writer. “She presents as closer to whiteness while I’m someone who’s more ambiguous,” he said. “Danzy’s been around some crazy conversations, which almost gives her the experience of being a spy.”

Senna attended Stanford in the late 1980s and early ’90s, when the school was a

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of student activism. She later worked in journalism, but found that fiction was a more engaging avenue for her to explore deeper convictions.

“The book I wrote when I was in my 20s, my first novel, it holds truth in it that I didn’t know I was even accessing,” she said. “Not just ******* truths, but truths about myself.”

She added, “With each book, I feel like it’s more and more liberation for me as a person and a writer.”

Senna lives in Pasadena with her husband, the novelist Percival Everett, and their two teenage sons. She began the novel that became “******** Television” years ago. The manuscript sat in a drawer while she helped her family navigate the pandemic, and when she returned to it, she was relieved to find the premise still felt funny. Writing a novel is so solitary, she said, “you might as well have fun while you’re doing it.”

In addition to keeping the author entertained, comedy is a useful literary pack animal, Senna said. “Humor gives you access to all those other feelings — of alienation, of erasure, of rage, of grief, of trauma.”

After decades of publishing, Senna knows to brace for the inevitable question: Why is she still writing about mixed-race characters?

“That question literally never gets asked of any other group,” she said. “Nobody asks Sally Rooney, ‘Why are you still writing about the Irish?’ Nobody asks Jonathan Franzen, ‘Why are you writing about white people again?’

“If you’re mixed, something really interesting is revealed to me in that question: It reveals that they don’t think of you as a people. They think of you as a predicament.”

Touring to promote “Caucasia” years ago, Senna recalled, “everyone would talk about how this was the first time a mixed-race character had been resilient and funny and plucky and real — they’d talk about it as if I had cured the tragic ********.”

In her fiction and in life, Senna is intentional with her use of the term “********.” The word comes from the Spanish word for “mule” — an infertile ****** of burden produced by two distinct species.

“Antebellum ideas are still so embedded in everything we do, and the insistence that we don’t exist is embedded in the word ‘********,’” she said. “The word ‘********’ means we are the end of society.”

The actress Tessa Thompson, who is collaborating with Senna on a screen adaptation, was immediately drawn to Senna’s perspective. “Danzy can be really biting and cut through things, but it’s never felt meanspirited,” Thompson said. “She has an ability to look at an idea, a thing, a person and see it in its wholeness.”

Senna’s work, Thompson went on, “sets her audience free.”

Late in “******** Television,” Jane returns to a passage by a (white) scholar whose study of mulattos influenced her doomed manuscript.

“My life’s work has been to try to define a people that cannot be defined or even located — for the ******** is the only race in our nation’s history that is perpetually shifting, changing colors, morphing into something unrecognizable,” the scholar writes.

“Goodbye, ********. You have haunted my dreams and my waking days for far too long.”

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