Ep. 336 Blackness is the Ingredient with Danzy Senna

Written By Megan Caballero
Ep. 336 Blackness is the Ingredient with Danzy Senna

Danzy Senna joins The Stacks to discuss her latest novel, Colored Television, a satirical take on one novelist's attempt to leave books behind and strike it rich in Hollywood. Today, Danzy explains why she uses the word "mulatto" in her work, how humor is integral to the mixed experience, and why all her characters make such bad decisions.

Don't forget, The Stacks Book Club pick for September is Jazz by Toni Morrison. We will discuss the book on September 25th with Eve Dunbar.

 
 

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TRANSCRIPT
*Due to the nature of podcast advertising, these timestamps are not 100% accurate and will vary.

Welcome to The Stacks, a podcast about books and the people who read them. I'm your host Traci Thomas, and I could not be more thrilled today to welcome one of my absolute favorite authors to the podcast. We are joined by acclaimed author Danzy Senna, who is here to discuss her newest novel, Colored Television.

This satirical story follows Jane, a mixed race writer, grappling with her identity as a novelist and a professor, but also trying to sell out to break into the entertainment industry. The book is hilarious. It is so sharp with critique of race class, the entangled world of Hollywood, and so much more.

Today, Danzy and I talk about this fantastic novel, The Word Mulatto, and I even get to ask her a few questions about her husband, Percival Everett. This is one you definitely do not want to miss. Don't forget, our book club pick for September is Jazz by Toni Morrison, and we will be discussing that book on Wednesday, September 25th with our guest, Eve Dunbar.

Everything we talk about on each episode of The Stacks can be found in the link in the show notes. If you like what you hear today, if you love this podcast, if you want to support the work that I do, if you want some inside access to the show, join The Stacks Pack. You can do that by going to patreon.com/thestacks.

It is just $5 a month. You get a whole bunch of perks like being part of our bookish community over on Discord. You get to come to our monthly virtual book club meetups.

You get to participate in our mega reading challenge and so much more. You also get to know that by joining, you're making it possible for me to make the show every week. So if that sounds like something you'd be into, head over to patreon.com/thestacks and join The Stacks Pack.

And here's a special shout out for some of our newest members of The Stacks Pack, Julie Sternberg, Deborah Gordon, Tessa, Samantha Brown, Simone Colley and Barbara Pullman. Thank you all so much. And for those of you who want to support the work of the show, who love the show, who want to know what I think about books, movies, TV, food, whatever, but you're not necessarily super excited about going to a virtual book club meetup, you should check out my newsletter.

It is at tracytomis.substack.com. I talk about all sorts of stuff. And that also supports the work of the show.

So thank you to everyone for making The Stacks possible. Now it is time for my conversation with Danzy Senna.

All right, everybody, I'm so excited. This is, I feel like, years in the making. I am joined today by one of my absolute favorite authors, the author of my favorite novel so far this year, Colored Television.

It is the wonderful, fabulous, amazing, incredible, hilarious Danzy Senna. Welcome to The Stacks.

Thank you so much. This is years in the making.

I know, I'm so excited.

I feel we've been waiting for this moment.

Yeah, I've been waiting for you, honestly, because new people came out before I had the show and I loved it. When I started the show, I was like, well, one day, Danzy will give me another book and we'll get to talk. I'm glad I waited because it was worth the wait and it's so good.

For people who have not been paying attention to me screaming about this novel, can you tell folks in 30 seconds or so what Colored Television is about?

The Hollywood Elevator pitch is about a writer, a mixed-race mulatto writer who fails in novel writing and decides to try her hands at Hollywood making the greatest biracial comedy of all times, and things don't go as planned. No.

Jane is our protagonist. I want to start with, well, since you said biracial and I'm sure you're going to get this question a million times on your press tour. Jane loves the word mulatto.

A lot of people don't love it. Why do you love to use it? Why does Jane love it?

because it's not just Jane who loves it, you use it in other stuff.

I did a word count on how many times I used mulatto in this book, and it was like 90 times. It was almost 100 times. It's a word I have been using since high school, and my siblings and my friends who were also biracial heritage, all used it because we loved how specific it is to being black and white and American, but also because it's such a vintage racist word.

It's like old-fashioned racist word that nobody calls you that in the playground. Like there's not a great risk in using it, that it's going to be used against you. It's comedy to me that they used to think we were like mules and that we couldn't procreate, which clearly we can, right?

We can, we can, we can do it.

And have.

Are you worried though, that like by using it, people will think that they can break, like what if you usher in the revival of Mulatto as a racial slur, like an everyday slur, like the N word?

I mean, wouldn't that be kind of hilarious?

Okay, I would love it. I am not a pearl clutcher, as you know. As you know, I think it's funny.

I was trying to bring back the word colored to describe all people of color, because I hate saying BIPOC or like, I'm just like, it's too much. It's white and colored. It's us versus them.

You're either in or you're out. But a lot of people don't like that I feel that way.

I don't understand that. I love the word colored. I love the word mulatto.

The thing is that race is not science. Biracial sounds like we still believe in this chemistry lab. Race is history, poetry, economic violence, political violence.

It's not a scientific thing. You use these ridiculous words and own the fact that we're talking about history here.

Yeah. I also personally, I mean, I just love quadroon. That's just a great word, period.

The best. That's the best. Like come on, those are unbelievably good words.

I know and it's the only place where we get to be specifically described.

Yeah. I think that's okay. So I do want to talk about that because you and I are both black and white mulatto American mixes, right?

And I feel like, you know, I personally use mixed over biracial, even though my Instagram handle is bitracial, but that's more of wordplay and not-

That's good.

And not like, it's good. It's perfect. I personally use mixed race, but I do feel like there's something to being able to say, I am this specific kind of mixed person, right?

Like there's Blasian, right? Like in black and Asian people, like they have Blasian and they're able to like lean into that. And there's other sub genres of black and Asian that have their own titles.

But I do feel like sometimes when people are like, oh, well, what are you mixed with? And then I'm like, black American and white. Well, I'm, I'm actually Julato.

Julato, yes.

Yeah, that's even more specific. But I just feel like I like having a word for us.

Well, it's, it's kind of, the fact is that we've been denied even being named or acknowledged historically. So I think there's some power in like acting as if we're a race, even though we don't fully subscribe to be distinctive from blackness. We're like a subgroup of blackness, but to actually be able to describe ourselves is something that has not been afforded to black, white, mixed people in America.

Like it's actually built into our history that we were completely erased from the story. So, so I think that part of the appeal of it along with the comedy. And I also like, I went in the 90s, there were these really big revival of like people of mixed race were going to find their own group and be empowered.

And there was this crazy moment. And I went to like a couple of conferences where I was asked to speak that were like multi-racial Americans conferences. And I was like, these people mean nothing to me.

Like, I don't have anything in common with anyone here, except for those few people who are mulatto. Like, I don't relate to these people's history. I don't have a problem with them.

But if you're half Asian and half white, like, we aren't really talking about the same thing because history matters. And God bless, like, that's great. But I don't think we're in the same conversation now.

Well, right. And I think, like, to your point, it also, it really strips the context of people's lives, right? It's like, I've been in conversations with people who have been like, oh, well, I'm Puerto Rican and whatever.

And I'm like, OK, like, yes, we are both mixed. But like, aside from that, the context of the mixing and the place from which you come, like, it becomes, it almost becomes meaningless, right?

Like, being lumped together is just like, OK, well, it also becomes this odious thing I called multiculturalism, where it's like everything's neutralized and turned into sort of like a food fair. And like, yes, we're going to have this like fusion mix of Korean and Panamanian food now. And it's like our history is so specifically loaded and so specifically brought.

And blackness is the ingredient there that I think, you know, you can't talk about mixed as being sort of inclusive of all these different mixtures and not say, well, blackness is something separate when you're talking about the history of this country. And it does have a-

Right, being black in America means something different. Totally. Oh my gosh, I agree so much

OK, so you and I are in agreement about mulatto, but you are a national book club pick. You're the Good Morning America book club pick. And that means you're going to have an audience that maybe hasn't thought about mulattoes and mixed race people in this way, who maybe it's outside of someone who would have come to your book because that's what these book clubs do.

They platform you in a certain way. Are you at all nervous or excited or I don't know? You tell me, how are you feeling about knowing that on Good Morning America, you're going to have to talk about mulatto and people are going to have feelings about that?

I mean, I'm a fairly irresponsible person. That's why I became a novelist and I'm not Kamala Harris. Right.

I don't take responsibility for the impact of the word mulatto spread far and wide. I think the stakes are pretty low about that word. If I was doing something that I felt was actually harmful, but I feel excited actually about it because I think, I've embedded all of these things I've been thinking about for decades and decades into a book that apparently is highly enjoyable to read for people who maybe haven't thought about these subjects.

So it feels like actually amazing that these ideas will be seeping into the larger mainstream for the first time in my life, in a much bigger way. I think the comedy and the fact that there's a marriage, and there's parenting and class and money, anxiety and aspirational fantasies in it, there's all these areas of connection that people hopefully will find. Then the race stuff is like, I think you hope that it just slightly changes the cellular makeup of people's thinking around this, and subtly without the feeling that is changing it, but it does.

I love that so much. As I said, you're one of my favorite writers. I love your work.

I am mulatto. We've talked about this. When I read this book, I read this book back...

Yes, I need a pin. I read this book back in January, and I was like, oh, I love this book. I love this book.

This book is all the things that I think about. I live in LA. I have so many friends who are in Hollywood.

I'm mixed. I have kids. I create things.

It feels so spot on to who I am, but since I read it and loved it, I've talked about it, and people are starting to read it. A lot of people who I'm like, you have no frame of reference for any of this book, are loving this book. I thought this was going to be my small little secret.

Kind of like how I felt about new people. Oh, Jonestown, which is one of my obsessions. I was like, oh, new people.

It's just something that me and my mixed friends could talk about. But you have really tapped into something broader here, I think, than maybe I was giving you credit for it, because I think that you're my secret, even though everyone knows about you, but I'm like, Danzy's mine. So I guess the question is, how are you thinking about audience?

How do you know how far you can push it and still make it feel authentic to someone like me who feels very close to the subject matter, but also feel accessible to someone from Wisconsin, who's never been to LA, who's not a writer, who's not a creative, who's all white, or all Chinese, or whatever. How are you thinking in those terms?

You know, I think I don't think about that when I'm writing. I think about you, Traci. I think about my closest insider audience.

I mean, I've been saying you, but like an audience member or a reader like you, who's so close to the joke that I'm telling, that they're going to get it on about six different levels. And I'm thinking about myself, that's the first reader. But the thing that it reveals to me is just that we all have emerged out of the same culture in some ways.

I mean, we are all Americans, and we are all products of capitalism and popular culture. And so the sort of hyper specificity, as they call it, of the mulatto experience is something that you don't have to relate to entirely to be enjoying this book. But I would also say that when I wrote Caucasia, my first novel, I was doing this thing of writing about the aspect of my identity that is the thing that is making me feel the most like a freak my whole life, the most like an outsider and an outlier.

And when I went on the tour for that book, what I realized was literature has this power that the thing that makes you feel most alone is the thing people are going to find a space of recognition in because everyone feels shame, everyone actually feels that they're passing, everyone feels a disconnect between their physical self and their invisible self. So there's levels of metaphorical truth and universality that I think is what comes out of writing from the hyperspecific actually. You don't write to the generic, you write to the specific and then hope people will find that place in themself.

That is whatever that character is.

Yeah. Well, I know myself and some of my closest Mulatto friends. We love it.

We love this book. We talk about it a lot. It has come up more times.

I mean, I've pressed copies. I've told your team at Riverhead, I'm like, send me another one. I have another Mulatto who needs it.

I'm just pimping out copies of the book. It's like charity. I'll be really honest with you.

I feel like most representation of black, white, mixed characters, both in film and in TV and in books, is not, it never hits the funny to me. You write about this in the book. There's this character, we haven't even gotten to this part of the book, but when Jane goes to, Jane's our lead, when she goes to leave academia novelist world, she gets her foot into the door of Hollywood, and she's trying to pitch this or come up with this great mulatto TV show, and the guy that she's working with who's Hollywood exec type, keeps talking about how being mulatto or being, he doesn't say mulatto, being mixed or biracial, is like the tragedy of it all and all of that part of it.

But I feel like everyone misunderstands that I feel like being mixed is like the greatest joke ever told, and that we have so much fun and are so funny and stupid and can laugh at everything and everybody because of who we are. And I feel like you tap into that better than anyone else. I don't even know where the question was starting, but there's a question there.

The joke of being mulatto, the hilarity of it.

Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, I think my siblings, I grew up in a household with, I'm the middle child of three, we were all like really close in age. And my dad is very funny.

He's got a very kind of gallows humor about race. My mother is very funny. And the level of humor around race was, I would say the prevalent mood in our conversations.

It was not about am I this or am I that? But it was like steeped in irony, which I locate in the black tradition. And it's a black humor and that I found the slice of that that is specifically mulatto humor.

And I think it's really interesting. Humor is a way of carving out an identity and saying who gets this joke? Who really gets this joke?

Those are my people. And we did that constantly as siblings and amongst our other friends who were mixed. We tried to find those spots of laughter because those were the ways that we survived the other sides of it because I don't discount the fact that, and I'm older than you, like this wasn't like a purely hilarious experience.

Sure.

Right. Like there was difficulty in my childhood that I could locate around that experience being mixed. And that is the being a black girl who looked white or who was presenting to others as white.

And so, you know, I think the best humor for me has a level of sadness or anger or alienation or darkness to it. It's not purely just like Jerry Seinfeld, you know?

Right. It's not slapstick. It's more satire.

Yeah. We're going toward Pryor, not Seinfeld.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Exactly. Exactly. No, I think that's right.

Like I do think there are aspects of being mixed that are challenging and can be really painful and can be really difficult. But I think that in artistic exploration, that is often all we get. I feel like it always feels so empty because I'm like, that doesn't represent how my life has been.

It's been a lot of like, oh yes, I like, where do I go and how do I fit in? I don't quite feel right and it's not till you find whatever, your people, but also it's been a lot of jokes about Tiger Woods. A lot of conversations about, I remember I had to do stand-up comedy in college.

It was the worst experience of my life. I made myself sick. I had diarrhea the whole day because I was so nervous, TMI.

But my big joke was about being black and Jewish and arriving late, but always having bagels or something stupid like that. But that is sort of always the joke, right? And that there's always a way to at least find the joke, even in or after the part that feels really shitty.

And I think to tie this into another part of your book that I think is so specific and so good is like the LA of it all.

Yeah.

LA is weirdly the mulatto city, even though it's not. But like the energy, right? Like LA is weird.

And yes, it is. It's chaos. It's chaotic in the way that we are.

Right.

Yeah.

And we're both raising kids here. So we're getting to see us sort of from a different generational perspective. And, you know, for my kids, it's like their racial experience is deeply hilarious and ironic constantly.

Right. Constantly.

And like, I mean, I could go on and on about the level of comedy of their experience in the LAPD, LAPD, LA public schools, not the PD. And I feel like they were born ironic and they were born sarcastic about race. And like that feels very much about being raised in LA to me, where-

And not who their parents are. I feel like between you and Percival, I think you guys might have had a hand at them finding the irony in every situation.

You're probably right.

because my kids are only four and a half, so who knows? But like, I have a sense they're not nearly as funny as your kids.

I'm worried about it. Like, it's a problem. I need them to at least pretend they're taking it seriously during the DEI week at their school because things can go terribly wrong with them in terms of this.

That's so funny. How much about Hollywood? Why was that interesting for you?

because in addition to this being a mulatto novel, it's also a Hollywood novel, right? In the same way that there's New York City novels. This feels like an extremely Hollywood book.

So why did you want to go there?

Having been a novelist for 18 years in Los Angeles, have had a flirting with Hollywood relationship but never consummating the act, but trying at times and failing. I thought it was funny. Every time I would go and try to make something in Hollywood, I was like, I'm going to go sell out now, and then it wouldn't go anywhere.

I was like, damn, I'm not very good at selling out. I think what I think is funny is just for me, a lot of the humor and the origins of the humor in this book in particular are like bleeding thoughts I would have that I would think, that's such an absurd thought that that would be funny if like a writ large in a character. One of those thoughts is like, nobody even reads novels anymore.

Why the beep am I doing this?

You can swear here, don't worry.

Why the fuck am I doing this? Why is everyone else getting to cash in on their identity, and I'm sitting here slaving for years on a novel, but apparently nobody cares about this form anymore. So it was all like these ramps I would go on, that became the source of this joke.

It was also like right after the summer of George Floyd, that sort of DEI performative mania that took over some of these creative industries, and it was like, we're gonna make content about race suddenly. We're really interested in this, and we all knew it was bleeding. We all knew that white people were gonna get tired of us, they were gonna stop feeling guilty, and so there was a rush on that.

I'm gonna be the mulatto that they pick, because I know they're not gonna pick more than one of us. And I just found that inherently funny and tragic and all of those things that make for really good fictional stew.

Yeah, and I feel like Hollywood's also so full of tropes, and this book is so full of those tropes. I mean, this isn't giving too much away, but early in the book, we find out that the way that Jane meets her husband Lenny is basically through a psychic, which, I mean, so I've read the book twice now. The first time I read it, I took a note, because I wasn't sure if you were going to come on the show when I read it the first time, right?

So I was just like taking notes just in case, and I went back and looked through them as I was taking notes again this time, and both times in that section, I just wrote, so LA., even though they're in New York, it's just like such an LA thing to be like, we met through a psychic, or like because of a psychic prediction.

And he's out in California, too.

He's in like Montecito or something, right?

Yeah. He's like a gay black psychic who is living in Montecito, and he has a daughter named Tuesday, and a cloth bathtub imported from England. And he's not a psychic, he's a racial alchemist.

He tells people their racial future. And he tells her, you know, she's going to meet a black, a funny black man at a party, and he's going to be wearing West Coast shoes. And I think you're right, the tropes.

I mean, there's like a romantic comedy, almost tropes there going on, and that's subverted in all these ways. And then there's the sort of, you know, I'd mentioned like Tyler Perry, and the sort of like poor person becoming rich and living in luxury. And that's like trading places, and all of these things that are storylines that I was tapping into in this, where it's like, she's gonna make it to Hollywood, and she's gonna turn their family's fortunes around, and it feels very Hollywood in and of itself.

Yeah, it's a very like bootstraps gone wrong kind of story. There's, I mean, I was taking notes as I was going, there's a lot of tropes, some of which we can't talk about because they're spoilers later on in the book, but there's a lot of like playing with that Hollywood stuff, which I also just love, because it does make the book feel so cinematic, right? Like it's like, you can imagine all of these moments with Jane so vividly, because we've been conditioned to understand this story, even as you're subverting it.

It's like, oh, I know what this thing is. I know who that woman is. I know what this moment is.

And it's really talking about like enjoyable. It's really gratifying to the reader because it, and I mean this as a compliment, you sort of do a lot of the work for us so we can just enjoy the story. Like I didn't feel like I was like schlepping through this.

I was like, oh, I know where we are. Like I did it, yeah.

I hope this is true because I'm still trying to sell out.

Oh no, you should for sure. I think if I could sell out, I would. Nobody wants to buy a book podcast, unfortunately.

I mean, I would, I would sell this to like for like $16 probably, like anything. I mean, that's another huge part of the book is like the money part. Like this is a book about money.

Well, this is like money, you know. And like money being success.

I mean, I grew up not with much money. And I mean, that's a bit of an understatement. Like my sister and I sound like we were like Dickensian.

We were getting jobs at 11 and 12, pretending to be 18. And our reason for needing to work as like clerks and stores when we were mere children was not that we had to pay our mother to buy groceries. It was because we wanted gold hoops and we wanted clothes and we wanted, and we didn't want to have to put them on layaway, which that's what we did back then in the 80s.

And we were extremely materialistic children. And my mother had no money. She was a Bohemian poet and she was like, you're on your own kids.

So money and my kids, we found all these diaries from high school in the basement and we're looking through them together. And every page of my diary in high school had money symbols around the diary entry. It was just a list of things I wanted to buy.

I mean, it was like, my kids were like, do you even have a soul? Who were you? And I was like, I was so anxious about acquiring things as a high school student.

And it was other stuff, drama with boys and friends and stuff. But like, yeah, I just, I think, you know, that's the like really distinctly American obsession, right? It's like, and it's a very LA one too.

Like LA is obsessed with money and obsessed with status around money. And everyone here feels that they're just around the corner from their big break in a way that, I don't think people in other cities feel. So the money part was, you know, something that I wanted to tap into that I sort of at one point in my life had this like real anxiety and hunger for as a kid.

Yeah. That next big break thing is again, so LA. That's the lie of LA.

If you don't believe that you would never stay here or not everyone, but like a lot of people would leave.

Well, the Uber drivers were all actors and the people at Starbucks working behind the counter, like everyone is sort of plugged into this dream machine, whether they show it or not, like there's some connection to it and it's the potential to turn your life around fantasy here.

Okay, wait, we're going to take a quick break and we'll be right back.

Okay, we're back. I want to ask you about the title of the book, Colored Television. It comes up very early in the book.

Lenny and Jane like to watch a certain type of television that they called Colored Television. Will you talk about, I happen to have insider information because I remember when we did the Riverhead Variety show, you all were up to the last possible moment trying to decide on the title. I'm curious what some of the other options were.

Yeah.

Well, the book was called for the longest time, nusu nusu, which is the title, and this was before I even sold it, the title of the novel that's the big failed novel that Jane is writing. It's called nusu nusu, which translates to Partly Partly, and it's the history of the Mulatto people for 400 years, a doomed project. I had that as the title, and then basically they felt, and I agreed with, that it wasn't as catchy as it could be.

because nobody knew, and I would tell people that title, and they would say, what?

What?

Knew what? Knew what? It wasn't recognizable words, it's Swahili.

They were like, you're signifying something that the book doesn't really come up with. So they were like, what about Partly, Partly? And I felt like that just was too betwixt in between.

And it didn't have the energy of the book. It felt like a tragic mulatto novel.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure.

And it was like too, I was like, I don't want to see those words on a shelf looking at me. And so I had to like go right before your variety show, like I was like, what the hell is the title? And that just jumped out at me as funny and sort of the way that it's described as being like trashy black television.

Another trope, right? So the trope of the book and the irony of the book in that title.

What about names? How do you name your characters?

That's really like the first thing that comes to me in a sense. And Jane was just always Jane and I couldn't fully explain it to people, except that I thought she was sort of obsessed with images and being kind of this cookie cutter person. And then I also thought about the reverberations with Sarah Jane in Imitation of Life, who's the ultimate tragic mulatto character from the classic movie of Douglas Zirk.

But all of those were like secondary thoughts. The first thing is what does this woman look like her name would be? And Jane was the name that I came to.

And then instinctually all those other names were just felt right. How did you like the names?

I love names. I always add so much though. Like I was just texting with a friend who just finished her book and loved it.

And I said to her, I was like, it must be a coincidence that this year it's Jane and James, because your husband's big novel this year is James. And I was like, they're just sitting in the house talking about James and Jane, Jane and James. Like I just couldn't get that out of my head.

obviously like the Hampton character, that name is so loaded. Hampton is such a loaded name. I actually think on the day that you and I are recording, today is actually Fred Hampton's birthday, if I'm not mistaken, maybe yesterday.

But I felt like that name, I think Lenny is such a peculiar choice for that character, but I love it. My nephew's name is Lennox, and I was like, I'll never call him Lenny. Now, of course, I call him Lenny every single day.

But it is such an old-timey name, but works for that disgruntled husband character. I think they really work, and I just like Brett. You know exactly who Brett is.

A mixed guy named Brett, it's just like, oh, I see you. I know you. So I feel like you're really good at names.

I think you really, in new people, Khalil or whatever, Khalil, depending on how you want to pronounce it, that's just such a name.

Well, names are so interesting because they tell us, unless you've chosen your name, yourself, they tell us about our parents' fantasy of ourselves, much more than they tell us about who we are. But then there's a whole psychological theory called nominal determinism, that depending on your name, you grow into a certain type of person, and the name has some power over who you've become. So as a novelist, I'm always really interested both in what's determined and what's told about, Hampton's parents may have been of that era, that were into Fred Hampton and radical black politics.

Then they have this son, who his trajectory is to become a network producer in Hollywood.

But to perform, but he performs the Hampton. He has sold the idea of Hampton even though he's really like everyone else, a sellout, right?

He's packaged it perfectly, yes.

Right. The joke of that name just lands so hard if you get it. It's just like, of course, this guy.

When you're talking about self-determination a little bit, I guess, I love plot. I've discovered in talking to some other reader friends, I guess everyone doesn't read the book trying to figure out what's going to happen next. Some people just read and just let it wash over them, not me.

I'm like, oh, this is a clue. I'll have the full whiteboard with the strings, like, okay, she said this, I'm fully going crazy. I like your books because there's things happen.

Usually, I can't guess what's going to happen in your books, because a lot of times I'm solving the book on page five. I'm like, oh, that person is actually dead or whatever. I want to know how you're thinking about plot as you're writing.

Do you, when you get the idea for the book, do you know X, Y, and Z is going to happen to Jane, or like that Maria is going to end up where Maria ends up, or are you like, I just want to explore Maria and she tells me what she's going to do or whatever?

I mean, I'm watching a house be built next door to us right now. And it's not unlike the horror that I'm seeing out my window right now. And you know, I spend so much time on each book to give the illusion to the reader that this was easy and breezy.

But the amount of labor that goes into it and scaffolding, and drafts upon drafts, you know, with plot, the first draft is me just trying to figure out who these people are, and then find my fictional distance from them. If they resemble someone I know, I have to find a way to make them someone else. And so many drafts into it, it starts to become clear what the sort of problem is from the beginning, that's going to unravel the story and what sort of, but each thing has to be caused by something that happened before it.

It has to make sense to the characters that created. And, you know, with this novel, the whole novel, they're subletting for this guy, Brett, a friend of hers' house, this beautiful house in the hills. And he's very wealthy.

He's out of the country. And they're doing things that they shouldn't be doing as house sitters. They're drinking all his wine.

She's wearing his wife's clothes. And she's using things of his and sort of exploiting him in a certain way. And he's calling her the whole novel.

And without giving anything away, she's avoiding his calls. And I didn't really know until the very end why he was calling her.

Right.

That was something where you kind of write your way to the answer, and then you look back to see what clues you've given yourself about why this is happening. But it takes... this is a very messy process.

It's a highly difficult and ugly, ugly process at times to create a story that moves and feels elegant.

Right. Right.

Terrible for a while.

Okay. This is also a compliment, but it might sound like an insult, but I mean it as a compliment. I'm a highly mean person.

I'm very mean. I feel like one of the things I like about your books is that, while I don't know if you are a mean person, you're very mean to your characters. We'll talk a little bit about meanness because I know some people, they really love their characters and they treat them so well, and they want you, the audience, to love them.

But I don't get that sense from reading your books that you feel that way.

No. Well, nobody wants to read, first of all, about happy characters with no problems. They just don't.

That would be the most boring novel in the world. I also feel that part of the reason I have to find fictional distance from all my characters is so that I can not only allow them to do things that I wouldn't want to be seen doing, and nobody knows that I do that, but that also I want to have things happen to them that I don't want to have happen to me. They have to become puppets for me to play out ideas and it can't be like, oh, this is my husband or this is my mother and I'm going to then protect them too much.

But once they become real characters on the page, all bets are off. But I would say that they're not only maybe I'm mean to my characters, but they're not very nice to other people.

No, no, no, no. I mean, it's like they're people that I root for your characters, even though I don't like them. Like the way that after I finish new people, the way that I talk about Maria is I'm just like, poor thing.

Like, don't invite her to my birthday. Like it's like we all know Maria, but we also like don't like Maria. But we do feel bad for Maria because it's like, girl, go to therapy.

Like, but like it's like you can relate to knowing Maria in a way that in some books it's like, oh, that person is like almost too clean. Your characters are messy and mean, and they like get into the muck in a way that I really enjoy that I think, you know, a lot of people need a likable character. And I don't think your characters are particularly likable in that sense.

But like I like them because I like getting to see people do the things that like you're saying I don't ever want to be caught doing.

I mean, you don't go to a novel to be at your birthday gathering. Like you go there to understand the human condition and to be entertained. So I think that's this weird idea that come into the culture that we should like these people.

That's not like I like people, but this isn't what I go to novels for. I also had this weird experience when Caucasia was published to be praised for writing against the tragic mulatto and writing the plucky, lovable child. I was realizing after that book was published that I have this sense of despair every time I would hear that.

It was like, first of all, I never want to write a child character again. And once someone becomes an adult, they're immediately complicit in the world that they've wandered into. They're not an innocent child being dragged around by her mother.

She, you know, and so as soon as I write a problematic character, then does she re-inscribe the tragic mulatto? Right. What is that pressure on us that we can't be as messy and human as any other character because we have this trope over our shoulder?

And I sort of had to liberate myself from that in extreme and just be like, I'm going to write into the mess of being human. And if you see this as tragic, then that says more about you than it says about me.

Yeah. That's so interesting. Okay.

I want to talk a little bit about how you write. How often, how many hours a day do you have music or no? Are you in your home?

Are there snacks and beverages? Talk about it.

I write in a library or the first draft I write outside of the house because my house is such a distraction pit, and I have children and a husband and dogs, and it's just a lot of food, access to food. So I have to go to a space in which it's not allowed. You can't snack and you have to just be focused.

But I used to write at all hours, and now that I'm a grown-ass woman with a job and a life outside of my writing, I have to limit it to certain hours a day because it's just playing with imaginary friends, it's got to have its time and place, and someone has to come and pick up someone at something. But with this novel, I would go out to Santa Barbara and spend the weekend at a hotel editing, and go and just isolate myself with, and not a nice hotel, just like a shitty, very generic hotel, which is an interesting, and all I have to do is look at this manuscript. I have ADHD for sure.

I've had it since I was a young child, so I have to do these tricks to get myself to not watch intervention episodes and things like that.

You said that you leave the house to, as Jane does, you said you leave the house to get away from your snacks. If you were going to stay in the house and have snacks, what snacks would you be having?

I like corn and Cadbury's fruit and nut chocolate bars.

Whoa

Not at the same time, different time.

No, I didn't assume at the same time. I just never heard anybody. I only know Cadbury cream eggs.

That's all I know.

Yeah, I have this very bad addiction to that, but when I was finishing this novel in the dark, dark days of finishing this novel, I was in the Huntington Library and I discovered there's a staff lounge with a vending machine where people go to drink the coffee from the machine. It's for the people who work at Huntington, not for the scholars and the library people. I got entry to this room and found out that they had skittles in the vending machine.

I had a bag of skittles for weeks, every day while I was finishing this and it was disgusting. My dentist was like, what happened?

Skittles are so gross but also sneaky good. It's one of those candies where they're very nasty, but also edible still in a pleasurable way. I totally know what you're getting at there.

I know that you guys don't talk about this a lot, but I'm going to ask you a little bit about your husband. Are you going to kill me? Is it okay?

Sure.

It's not a serious question. I just want to know, you're married to Percival Everett. You two are my two favorites.

I don't know.

I love both of your work. Do you all share your work with each other? Do you ever go to him and be like, I can't get this thing to work?

Or he comes to you and he's like, I don't know. James and Huck are just on this fucking raft or Monk is so annoying. Is there any working together or is it like, go in your room and write your little book and send it to your editor like, I am your spouse?

You know what? I'm actually glad you asked that question because the answer is really funny and really clear is that we never share our work with each other. I read James and Gally.

Oh my gosh.

Read it until it was finished. I think if you were to come and just be a fly on the wall, you might think we were like two dentists who got married.

Like you just don't talk about work at home at all.

We sort of allude to it. We allude to it, but somehow without even discussing it, it was like we're not each other's editors, we're not each other's teachers, we're fully grown creative artists, and we're going to give each other that space, but there's not an exchange of work going on. And there's an appreciation of each other's work, but we talk about politics and other people's art all the time.

But not each other's.

But there's not like, can you edit my manuscript ever in this out cold? And it's very interesting, dentist vibes.

I love this, I love this. Okay, I have one more follow up question, and you don't have to answer this one. Have you ever read one of his books and been like, I don't like it?

Or he read something of yours and been like, it's not good. Like at the end, because that would be my greatest fear in life, right? That I make this thing and that my husband or someone very close to me, like sees it and is like, not your best.

Like I'd be like, I'm dead. So I would try to give it to my husband very early so that he could help me so that I wouldn't ever have the moment where the person that I love on the like, a person that I love a lot on the face of the earth is like, well, they'll always have next week's episode.

Yeah, I mean, I think we liked each other's work before we ever were friends. So and the thing about novels and stories and writers is that work can be imperfect and still have an intelligence about it. So yes, I think we judge work differently.

And you know, it's like a part of a body of work. We both are very committed to like the beauty of imperfection. So that's my politic answer.

Okay, I will come off this topic because I know you guys don't ever talk about it in the pub, I didn't find out you guys were married until like a year ago. I was like, wait, what's happening? Anyways, and I, you know, whatever, I don't, we're done.

But I do want to talk about another famous person that you're linked with, which is of now Kamala Harris. because we now have our great mixed presidential woman candidate. She's not a true mulatto because she's Jamaican and Indian.

But you wrote about her and wrote about race in the New York Times for an op-ed that I obviously loved and devoured. We're talking about this in September. The election is going to be coming up soon.

I text my friend Zach because he had just read your book. When she came out as a candidate and Trump was like, she's not black, I was like, this is fucking Danzy season. I was like, I'm so excited that her book is coming out in the midst of-

I told Trump to say that.

Yes. I know you did. I know you were like, Trump, JD, I need a favor.

Can you guys say something crazy? You target her for being mixed.

Yeah. I need book sales. I started taking notes when I watched him saying that to her.

I was on vacation and I was like, oh my God, this is such a perfect encapsulation of what the attitude is towards the mulatto. He's just performatively revealed to us what it is that we experience in this country in terms of the bewilderment and the imposter idea. I started taking notes and I then abandoned them to go swimming and hang out with my kids.

Then I got an email from the New York Times saying, they didn't say this, but it was like resident mulatto. Yes. I went on this in some form and I was like, oh wait, I have finished that essay, I better just finish it.

But I mean, it's interesting. Like I don't feel the same level of like sentimental jubilation about it that I'm supposed to feel. I just feel like obviously what everyone else feels that it better happen.

Yeah. Do you feel differently about her than maybe how you felt about Obama, another famously mixed non mulatto?

Why, what do you mean? I mean, I'm interested in why you're asking that.

I'm just thinking because obviously I was extremely young. Obama, I had just graduated college. I moved away.

I volunteered to work for Obama. I quit my job. I moved to Colorado for like two months to knock doors for him.

At that phase in my life, I was very different than I am now, much less cynical. But I feel like something for Obama was like, he's mixed and he's like me because of that. Whereas in retrospect, when I look back on him and I realized like, oh, he is mixed and he is black and white, but he isn't American black and neither is she.

Now I start to have these questions about what is deficient in black Americans that we can't be president. It does shape my excitement about her. I'm much more cynical about her identity than I was about Obama's.

I think it's a lot of different pieces, but I think that's part of it. I also think part of it is that her strategy seems to be not to embrace her diversity or the fact that she, or not even just her, not to embrace her racial makeup at all, or ethnic makeup in a way that Obama really did hammer that home. So I'm wondering if that's shaping how I feel about her too.

I also think the fact that Trump came in between.

I wonder if Michelle is also the Michelle component. because I thought more radical than Obama in the White house was Michelle in the White house.

Yes.

And she is a Black American. She is a highly melanated beautiful Black woman who was in the White house. And to me, that made that difference to looking at them as a couple, being the first Black family in the White house.

And I think Kamala is exciting for me on other levels about being a woman. But I think we're all a little bit more jaded than we were. Yes.

I think you're right. Our souls are weary. We've also seen all the Black people in MAGA hats and Clarence Thomas.

And we don't equate someone's body and what that body signifies, with what their politics are, what they're going to do. So we all have to be, I think, a little more vigilant than we ever were about who this person really is as a person, what policy, but the symbolism, I guess, feels thin at a certain level. Yeah, it does.

But it doesn't mean that it's not going to be good for books. Right.

No, it's going to be great. Sell out, sell out, sell out. And I also think, I've had these conversations with a lot of my friends of like, there are not enough smart people on mixed race identity for this election cycle.

Like there are so many stupid people talking about this where I'm like, well, I'm so sorry, but you don't understand actually what's happening here. And I think that that has also colored how I think about comma because I'm irritated about having to even read or like listen to some of this in a way that with Obama it sort of was like more novel. And I was like, oh, I'm curious to know how what other people think of us, right?

And like now I'm like, no, you're a fucking idiot. Like you don't get it.

I mean, I think we are as mixed people, we are given so many privileges. We're so visible. We're so over represented in black roles.

Like it's the woman is always biracial and all of these things that are really problematic about mulattos.

Yeah.

At the same time, I think there's like a lack of a real conversation about mixed identity and not just about the like joys and subtleties and connections and humor of that, but also about there is a very specific kind of hostility that targets people of mixed race, that isn't any worse than any other kind of hostility. It's just specific and I want to sort of name it and explore it as a writer because it's something we all know what it is. We've all felt it at different moments and like it's, yet it hasn't been talked about.

Yes, that's so right. But like you were saying in the beginning about the specificity of mulatto, it's like, it's not anti-blackness, it's anti-mulattoness. Like it's like specific to us.

And you're absolutely right, of course, like the over-representation, also the like surprise and delight that people, certain people find when like they discover someone is mixed, right? Like it's like, oh, what a charming, lovely thing. Like now I can celebrate this person in a different way, which is like that privilege that you're talking about sort of both sides of it.

Well, I think you and I both, neither of us feel neutral because we are mixed. That's not the space that leaves us then. We are not like some politically neutral sort of panacea.

We're very clear on where our allegiances are in this country and where we position ourselves. So that kind of whitening and neutralizing of mixedness is also something to kind of constantly resist.

Yeah. Okay. This is a very random question, but what's a word you can never spell correctly on the first try?

Rhythm. To use a very racially coded term. I can't remember my black card now, but I could never spell rhythm on the first try.

You don't have to be able to spell it to be black, but you do have to have it to be black. So that's fine. That's fine.

For people who love Colored Television, what are some other books you might recommend that are in conversation with that book?

I would say Nathaniel West, The Day of the locust. It's one of the great novels and it influenced me a lot. I would say, I love black, satirical writing, but these ones that people maybe haven't read or thought about, like Black No More and Fran Ross Oreo.

I've written about both of those books.

We did Oreo on Book Club last year on the show. So we read your intro or your piece. Yeah.

Right, but I was gonna say, there's a film that nobody has seen that I feel influenced me profoundly. That's from the 90s, a completely indie black film called Chameleon Street that is so funny. I laughed so hard when I saw it in my early 20s, maybe I was in college, about a black man, a con artist who is desperate for money, and he's willing to do anything to get money.

And it's the funniest movie I've ever seen. And it's deeply misogynist, trigger warning, but it's deeply funny. Okay.

Last question. If you could have one person dead or alive, read this book, who would you want it to be?

Richard Pryor.

Okay, that's good. That's good. That's not the sellout answer though, Danzy.

So you're not good at selling out.

Oh, do you mean like, buy this book?

No, no, no. I meant the answer you gave me, but I thought maybe you would give me something like the number one buyer at, yeah, Barack Obama. Get it on the list.

That was not the sellout answer. He can't do anything for me, Pryor.

No, no, he's useless too, but it's the right answer. All right. Well, everybody, wherever you are, go get your copy of Colored Television is out in the world as you're listening to this.

If you've already read Colored Television, but you haven't read New People or Caucasian, go get those books too. You can come into my DMs and talk about all of them with me. I am available to discuss all things Danzy Senna.

Danzy, thank you so much for being here. This was a joy.

Such a pleasure, thank you so much.

And everyone else, we will see you in The Stacks.

All right, y'all, that does it for us today. Thank you so much for listening and thank you again to Danzy Senna for being my guest. I'd also like to say a huge thank you to the team at Riverhead, Ashley Garland, Afrin Alabaqshisada and Bianca Flores for helping to make this conversation possible.

Don't forget, The Stacks Book Club pick for September is Jazz by Toni Morrison. We will be discussing the book on Wednesday, September 25th with Eve Dunbar. If you love this podcast and you want inside access to it, head over to patreon.com/thestacks to join The Stacks Pack and subscribe to my newsletter at tracithomas.substack.com.

Make sure you’re subscribed to The Stacks wherever you listen to your podcasts, and if you’re listening through Apple Podcasts or Spotify be sure to leave a rating and a review. For more from the stacks follow us on social media, @thestackspod on Instagram, threads, and TikTok, and @thestackspod_ on Twitter and check out the website thestackspodcast.com This episode of the stacks was edited by Christian Dueñas, with production assistance from Megan Caballero. Our graphic designer is Robin McCreight and our theme music is from Tagirijus. The Stacks is created and produced by me, Traci Thomas!

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