The most relatable fictional writers don’t read much. I will die on this hill. Give me the fictional writers who investigate, snoop, pry, procrastinate, avoid; who self-medicate away deadlines by cleaning the house and dirtying their personal lives. Real-life writers understand this: When immersed in a long project, it’s sometimes frighteningly easy to let the voice of another book slip into your own. It’s almost like tainting the slate. To keep your work safe, you can sometimes go months without reading. Writing a book takes enormous mental and emotional effort, and personally, at the end of a long session, or after I turn in a draft, all I want to do is lie on the couch and watch the dumbest thing my streaming services have to offer.
Jane, the fictional writer at the center of Danzy Senna’s new novel, Colored Television, doesn’t pick up many books. I fully registered only one mention: her husband, a painter, reading about color theory during a camping trip. It’s one of many details here that speak directly to writers, each more brutal and gratifying than the last. “Would you still love me if I told you I don’t want to look at that wretched novel ever again?” Jane asks that same husband one night. Translation: Just because I love this thing doesn’t mean it isn’t also ruining my life.
And then there’s this: “One of the worst parts of teaching was how, like a series of mini strokes, it ruined you as a writer. A brain could handle only so many undergraduate stories about date rape and eating disorders, dead grandmothers and mystical dogs. A brain could take only so much purple prose and mechanical epiphany.” You may want to rescind Jane’s teaching credentials. Me? I want to buy her a drink.
Jane is fascinating not only for her blunt honesty and artistic ambitions but also because she consistently makes choices that involve taking things from other people. It isn’t that she’s cruel—though imperfect, certainly, like anyone—but rather that she’s curious in the way all writers are, driven by her desire for the career and family life she always pictured herself having, while occasionally a little bored with the minutiae of daily life. Curious, driven, bored: This is the holy trinity of qualities for a writer, a set of reasons to stir things up. When we first meet Jane, she, her husband, and their two children are staying for free at the home of her rich friend Brett, who’s making money writing zombie TV shows. She drinks all his wine and wears his wife’s clothing. Then she pursues a meeting with Brett’s television agent without asking his permission and pitches his idea for a show.
All this, of course, comes back around to haunt her, as we know it must, and it raises the same question writers have long been asked to answer: How much are you allowed to take from real life for the sake of your art? Or more specifically: How much are you allowed to take before the art starts taking back from you? As Jane’s husband, Lenny, says, “real artists are relentless.” I don’t care to use the term “likable” in regard to female protagonists, so I will just say that Jane’s relentlessness is entertaining even though we suspect it may not end well, and instead of rooting for her to knock it off, I found myself wanting her to keep on going, to see where she would twist her own plot.
Being a writer—or any kind of artist—means you are always fumbling with dualities: the real world in which you live versus the fictional world of your characters; the actuality of your writing career versus the one you first dreamed up for yourself. “She’d never understood so profoundly how much being a novelist was at odds with domestic life, with sanity,” Senna writes. “But now she saw it clearly. To be a novelist was to be a dreadful parent. To be a novelist was to be a monstrous marriage partner. That kind of writing had no beginning and no end. It just crept around the house, infecting every element of family life. You couldn’t live with it, you couldn’t live without it.”
Jane is no stranger to these dichotomies. A biracial woman who has worked for 10 years on a novel about biracial characters, she understands how complicated it can be to feel always as if you are never “enough” of something. “See, I have this theory,” she tells a Black producer with whom she is (sort of) working. “Mulattos are like the queer people of races. Like gay characters, you might have noticed, who always kill themselves in movies. So do mulattos.” What she really wants is to write stories about half-white, half-Black characters who are “you know, just regular. Relatable.”
If Senna is trying to channel her own desire to create such characters through Jane’s artistic ideals, she succeeds. You don’t have to be a writer to feel the intensity of Jane’s desire for a better, more financially stable life for her family. Colored Television is a book about how hard it is to make a book—how hard it is to do anything, really, when an artist’s worth is largely tied to how much money she is making, how many reviews she has, and whether or not her book was immediately optioned. But it is also about want—regular, relatable want—and how it can lead you to take things you never thought you’d reach for in the first place.•
Join us on September 19 at 5 p.m. Pacific time, when Danzy Senna will sit down with California Book Club host John Freeman and special guest Porochista Khakpour to discuss Colored Television. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
Jackie DesForges is a writer and artist in Los Angeles. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Off Assignment, the Coachella Review, Air/Light, and more.
