Why Danzy Senna says writing ‘Colored Television’ was a struggle

In Danzy Senna’s provocative and funny new novel, “Colored Television,” a writer named Jane is at the end of her rope – and it’s fraying badly. 

Jane is struggling: While her friends have found success in television, her decade-in-the-making sophomore novel remains unfinished; her precarious financial situation will get worse if she doesn’t publish and get tenure. Her husband’s artistic purism renders his paintings purposely unsellable. Her son’s behavior seems to be asking for either a clear diagnosis or more nurturing of his idiosyncrasies. And she’s living on borrowed time, housesitting above her means for a soon-to-return friend, knowing she’s heading back to a less desirable part of Los Angeles unless fortune smiles on her soon. Very soon.

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Jane also worries about being categorized, as a mother, a novelist, and by her mixed-race ancestry when suddenly a high-profile prestige TV producer wants her to use her literary chops to create “the Jackie Robinson of biracial comedies.”

Senna has a lot in common with Jane. She relocated from the East Coast and now lives in South Pasadena, and she still feels a sense of dislocation after two decades in Los Angeles. It has been seven years since her last book and her writing has focused on her mixed-race background in novels like “Caucasia” and “New People” and her memoir, “Where Did You Sleep Last Night.” She even started to “dabble” in Hollywood. 

Senna, a professor of English at USC and married to “James” novelist Percival Everett, spoke by video recently about drawing on her own life to create Jane’s world. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

Q. You’ve talked about blurring the line between autobiography and fiction. Is Jane’s struggle a meta thing? 

Every book I write is a struggle. And I have friends who went into television writing and those of us who staunchly stuck to our novel writing started feeling like a relic. Prestige television was calling me. Writing with a lot of irony or kind of dark comedy, I did have a moment of wondering if television was a better venue for my way of telling stories. I think the literary world has been more averse to certain tones, especially around race and identity. 

It’s an interesting tone to me and it’s a really hard thing to write but comedy and literary fiction have been uneasy bedfellows. And I can’t really write things that are just one tone of seriousness so I did start to dabble a bit in Hollywood over the last seven years, but nothing really kind of came of it. 

Q. You call attention to the way we categorize people, even employing an older racial term that many today consider offensive. Are you hoping that will help us break free from those habits?

I’m not trying to be prescriptive. I lean into the reality of American culture and describe what I notice. I grew up in a culture obsessed with categories. I emerge out of it and my characters merge out of it. 

The term “mulatto” is a vintage term, but I’ve talked a lot to my friends who are also mixed and we all have a fondness for it because it’s the only term that’s very specific to us. And mulatto emerges out of an American black-white binary with a very specific meaning and history to it. So I’m reclaiming with irony and self-awareness. 

I grew up in a household in which race was often a subject of humor – we joked about it constantly. In my work, race is an opportunity for play and for humor as much as it is for serious excavation. 

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Q. The first sentence, “Jane had to remind herself it was February,” seems to be about Jane’s sense of dislocation within her world. Where did that line come from?

Los Angeles felt like its own character. I’ve lived here now for 18 years and I still get confused about what season it is because I’m so used to my East Coast markers. And it felt like it had a lot of metaphorical meaning. 

Plus, February is Black History Month, which adds a comic and ironic note, being the shortest and darkest, gloomiest month. 

Q. What role does L.A. play as a character?

I’ve always been fascinated by Los Angeles because it felt so much the opposite of where I grew up in Boston and then came of age in Brooklyn. It’s very mysterious to me and has so much mythos, yet it’s a hard city to find. When you live here, you’re searching for the L.A. that’s in your head, but there really is no Los Angeles, there are just different neighborhoods that doesn’t quite add up to one coherent city. 

Also, so much of my work has a preoccupation with history, since I was born to a Mayflower mother and a father from the Deep South, but Los Angeles always felt like this ahistorical place. 

And this book is very much about money and class. And in Los Angeles that can be divorced from family lineage and name. You can be talking to your Uber driver and in their head, they’re just two meetings or two auditions away from becoming the next Brad Pitt or Denzel Washington. There’s a sense of incredible possibility to jump into another class at any moment with one lucky meeting. I love that about this town, but it’s a kind of hysteria and mania too, so it’s fascinating.

Q. There are so many issues and insights in the book on so many subjects. How do make sure they’re organic and not just crammed in there in a contrived way?

I usually begin from a place of autobiography, then I slowly find lies to tell along the way to build it out as fiction. So there’s no conscious decision, what I write about is just a part of my reality. And race is so organic to my reality that there’s not a day that goes by that I don’t think about it or have an encounter that brings it up. These are families and characters that are in the world but that I don’t see them reflected in literature. I’m trying to write them into existence. 

Q. Jane talks about how she gets defensive when her college students challenge her idea but then she usually realizes that they’re right. Sounds like my relationship with my sons. Is it difficult for you to accept that reality?

I just kind of think that the youth are usually right, both my teaching and my children. I may have information they need that I can impart to them but when I try to lecture them I realize that what I’m saying is not informed by the same things as their world. 

I often rant to my brother about my students constantly correcting me and their silly posturing and wagging their fingers at me. But, of course, that’s what they’re here for, and they have to push us to some new reality. That’s what the young have always done. All you have to do is look to history to realize that the young are almost always correct – give it ten years and what they’re saying is going to seem completely middle of the road.