Though Danzy Senna isn’t waiting for her Hollywood moment, she has been marking time until she felt ready to write a novel about her adopted hometown.“I’ve been wanting to write my L.A. novel for 20 years,” she says via Zoom from her Los Angeles home. The room is sunny, and Senna is dressed in a white button-down, her long, dark brown hair framing her face. “I’m obsessed with California as a trope and a landscape and sort of this American Dream–on-steroids feeling.”
The author’s latest novel, Colored Television (Riverhead, Sept.), follows Jane, a struggling writer who is housesitting with her family in an L.A. mansion while working on her second novel (“a mulatto War and Peace”). Jane is seduced by the Hollywood dream, but finds herself disillusioned with prestige television.
It’s an experience Senna knows well. She moved to L.A. from New York to get an MFA at the University of California, Irvine nearly two decades ago and ended up staying. Living in L.A. as a novelist, she says,“you start to feel your irrelevance. You start to wonder if you’re not this funny, quirky little relic from the last century. I would go to a party and say I’m a writer, and the question is always, ‘Oh, has any of your work been adapted?’ ”
The answer to that question is complicated. Adapted, yes. But not produced. Senna has seen books optioned, and she’s written feature screenplays and TV pilots.
“I was so amused and horrified,” she recalls. “As a novelist you’re not used to all that hyperbole and the hysteria of the language. ‘I love you! You’re a genius! We’re gonna make this show.’ Then hurry up and wait. I was really interested in the mania of it. It’s like, this is the fairy godmother I’ve been waiting for. And then: nothing. You spend four years writing a novel and at least you have a novel at the end, whether it’s published or not. But all these screenplays I wrote, they just floated off into the ether.”
Colored Television delves into the darker side of the entertainment industry, especially its approach to diversity—and the lessons Jane learns during her Hollywood adventure are startlingly universal. “I wanted to explore what it would be like for the average Jane to get caught up in that world—how would it affect her family life?” Senna says. “How would it affect her marriage and her relationship to her children and her relationship to her own work? It’s that feeling of being in this sort of fraudulent middle class, where like underneath you are really nothing and you have all this culture and education. You’re sort of doing these cool jobs in your artwork and your teaching, but it’s very precarious. I love a desperate character. How far is she willing to go? What is she willing to give away?”
Senna also draws from her experiences growing up in a multiracial family of creatives in Boston with no safety net. Her white mother, poet Fanny Howe, traced her roots back to the Mayflower. Her father, Beacon Press editor Carl Senna, was a Black man raised in poverty in the South. The pair split when she was six, and while shuffling between their homes, Senna was bused to a school in posh Brookline as part of the district’s desegregation efforts.
“All my work explores race, yes, but also class is such a theme for me, too,” she says. “The examination of the relationship between money and art, and how it awakens the monster within us.”
At 12, she began writing her first novel, swapping pages with her sister and brother and reading aloud to her mother. “We were a very creative household,” she says. “We had a very strong imaginary life together, with games and make-believe friends and fantasy. I was very lucky to have parents who were poor on cash but high on literary culture. I was never happier than when I was reading a novel, whether it was Judy Blume and V.C. Andrews and Harlequin romances or Toni Morrison, Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin. I would read anything I could get my hands on.”
But by the time she got to high school, she was less interested in books and, she says, “obsessed with the idea that I didn’t want to be poor. And I didn’t want to be like my parents.”
After high school, Senna attended Stanford with the idea of becoming a doctor but failed organic chemistry. She changed her major to American studies and took some literature classes. “And it was like, okay, I’m going back to the family business.” She then worked at Newsweek as “one of the worst fact checkers ever” before her move to California to attend UC Irvine.
“I wrote my first novel, Caucasia, from beginning to end during that MFA program,” she says. “It was rejected over and over. Back then, there was literally nothing about people of mixed race and the world I was trying to convey. Kept getting, ‘Nothing about this is relatable.’ ”
But Senna persevered. Published by Riverhead in 1998, Caucasia reflects her experiences of growing up biracial, delving deep into ’70s politics, racism, and class distinctions. “All through my works, that is the geography that I’ve been writing from, the world that I am interested in. I get to explore all these bigger universal questions through this very specific lens.” The novel was a bestseller, won the Stephen Crane First Fiction Award and the ALA’s Alex Award, and was nominated for the Orange Prize.
Since then, Senna hasn’t looked back. She published the psychological thriller Symptomatic (2001), the memoir Where Did You Sleep Last Night? (2009), the short story collection You Are Free (2011), and the novel New People (2017). She also teaches in the creative writing program at the University of Southern California.
All Senna’s books tackle race, both embracing and eviscerating modern conversations about diversity. “Any Black person in America knows that the scarcity model is real,” she says, “and there’s also a ticking clock and they’re going to get bored of you fast and default to whiteness, so you better make your mark.”
This truth, Senna says, applies “in Hollywood and in life.” She recalls a moment early in her teaching career—before she became a professor at USC—during protests around race and diversity. “The faculty had these hiring meetings, and diversity kept coming up,” she says. “And I blend into a white room, and people don’t realize there’s a person of color there. I remember so distinctly a white professor saying to the room, in a hushed, conspiratorial voice, ‘We give them what they want for a few years, and this will pass.’ He thought they were alone. Safe.”
At 54, Senna says she’s lived that moment a hundred times in a hundred different settings. And its sense of uneasiness and displacement permeates her work and ties her oeuvre together. And such experiences, she adds, highlight the importance of learning to trust her own vision. “You have to have blind faith that what you’re doing is worthy and that you’re going to do whatever it takes to find a way to put this into the world. I was thinking about Frankenstein and the story of how the doctor creates this creature that comes to life. And then he runs away from it. It’s often been interpreted as being about art and the fear of one’s own creation. It’s a hard lesson, learning to embrace your voice, to protect your vision.”
That’s why, while she won’t say no to that next film option if Hollywood comes calling, she’s a novelist first and foremost. “With fiction, you’ve created something so pure—you’re in control of every aspect of it,” she says. “It’s the singularity of being a novelist as opposed to this collaborative thing that gives away control and requires all this financing and drama. Writing a novel allows this creative experience not found anywhere else. And I wouldn’t give it up for anything, despite the loneliness and despair that sometimes comes with it.”
Sona Charaipotra is a journalist, editor, and the author of six books.
