Blaise Zerega: Hello everyone and welcome to Alta Journal’s California Book Club. It’s a thrill to be here tonight for Danzy Senna’s Colored Television. We'll be joined by host, John Freeman, and special guest, Porochista Khakpour. My name is Blaise Zerega. I’m Alta Journal’s editorial director. And we’ve got a full house tonight, so I encourage everyone to please say hello. Let us know in the chat where you're Zooming from. I'm broadcasting live from foggy San Francisco this evening. While you're all doing that, I wanted to run through some housekeeping.
Tonight’s event is part of the California Book Club. It's Alta’s free monthly gathering. We celebrate books that help form a definitive guide to understanding life in the Golden State. And in the weeks leading up to each club meeting, altaonline.com publishes numerous articles and excerpt and interview essays about that month’s pick. And if you haven't had a chance to read them, you'll want to make sure you go back and do so.
Check out the fantastic essays by John Freeman, by California Book Club editor Anita Felicelli, and writer Rasheeda Saka. There's even a comic by Nichole LeFebvre. There's an excerpt, and there's more. We even commissioned a special booktail: not a cocktail, a booktail. And appropriately, it's called Colored Television. It's a twist on the rank odors in Jane's mom-mobile, which if you've been in a car with small children, its fermented apple juice and rotten apple slices, some cheese sticks, whatever, but it's a twist on that, of course.
Apple, brandy, lemon juice, simple syrup, and garnished with an apple slice. It's very refreshing. And all the articles included in the California Book Club are on the website and in our newsletter—please sign up for a newsletter, they're free. We also have several other newsletters that you might like. So sign up. Please trust me, you're going to love, love our newsletters and every CBC episode.
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So that's it. That's enough of my pitch, but please consider supporting us, join Alta today. It's altaonline.com. So without further ado, I know we're all anxious to get started. Please let me turn this over to the host of tonight's California Book Club gathering, John Freeman.
John Freeman: Thanks, Blaise. Hello everyone from Turlock to San Francisco to Las Vegas. It's great to be back to be here for today's book club about Colored Television by Danzy Senna. I think all of us remember when we read something by an author who we think, "Oh, my God, I'm going to read everything this person writes." And for me, it was a short story called The Care of the Self. It was a long short story about two friends who meet up, one has gotten divorced and it folds through time. This is a short story that Danzy Senna wrote. And you realize in the course of this meeting that the two friends who have just met up, their lives were not always in that order. In fact, they had been completely flipped around. One was the enviable person whose life seemed the picture of domestic bliss when, in fact, it was crumbling from within.
And reading this story, you get all the things that Danzy Senna is so good at, friendships, and especially amongst women, the sense that the way that we project our lives outward is not how they are actually lived. And the deep enmeshment between us and everyone around us who we feel close to or even friends with, and the way we judge our lives together with them, it makes amazing fiction. I read this short story about 10, 12, 15 years ago, and I thought, "Anything this woman writes, I will read." And I went back through her work and read Caucasia, her debut novel, which won the Stephen Crane Award; her second novel, Symptomatic. And one of the things about being a Danzy Senna fan is that you have to wait a little bit, but it's worth the wait.
And what's exciting about today is not only has Danzy Senna published a new novel, but it is unequivocally a triumph, her best novel yet. Deeply funny, so broad that it can put in things there about family life, about competition within a marriage, about what it's like to work on the fringes of Hollywood, how to work in an industry that is constantly exploiting you, how to not exploit your own inner life. It's just a profoundly good book about television, which is a very difficult thing to do in a state in which we worship television and the industry which makes it.
You might know in the course of this conversation we'll ask Danzy some questions. But to get it out of the way, she was born in Boston, the child and grandchild of writers, also the child of a musical prodigy. She grew up there, went to Stanford, studied American studies, got her MFA at the University of California, Irvine, and lived around the world, London, elsewhere, New York. Has settled in LA where she teaches at USC and is the author of four novels, a short story collection and a memoir, Where Did You Sleep Last Night?
Most importantly, but just as a side thing, she's also on the California Book Club Selection Committee, and we had to twist her arm to be part of this, but her novel is so good and it feels like a triumph we should celebrate, and it's nice to have something to laugh about, even if it's about very serious things. So please join me in welcoming Danzy Senna. Hey Danzy.
Danzy Senna: Thank you so much, John. I love that introduction.
Freeman: There's a lot to say, a lot to cover, but I want to just jump right in because this is one of the last novels I can remember in my mind in the last couple years that made me laugh out loud, where I didn't just go, "Huh?" It was just a real guffaws. And sometimes it was a line where at some point, you describe the producer that your main character, Jane, gets sucked into working with where he takes naps, like a Tesla recharging himself.
To her husband, who is an artist who is Black and dreams of taking their family away from the toxic environment of LA. And she describes his lifestyle dream as the witness protection program lifestyle. And I'm curious what you find funny and what you've consistently found funny over life because this feels like you stepping forward and claiming your humor in a big way.
Senna: Yeah, it's funny. I think all of my work has a lot of comedy in it, but I think in this book, I allowed myself to really, as you said, claim it or lean into it. And I think it feels like a really transgressive tone actually at this moment. I think we've been besieged by earnestness in both extremes of the sides of the country and in the social media tone of humblebragging and just taking everything as an opportunity to position oneself as above other people.
And so for me, the joke is always on myself. I'm the first butt of every joke I make. And the world that I live in and inhabit, it's always the thing I'm most making fun of, but then there are casualties all around it. But I think comedy has been a huge part of my family, the family that I grew up in, my father and my mother and my siblings. And I grew up in Boston in the 1970s when being biracial artists who didn't have any money, there was a lot of ways that I felt outside of the mainstream, and it was very easy to feel other, like you were the other amongst others.
And I think my father, in particular, has really modeled for me the way that humor is a way of attacking without attacking, a way of defending and surviving things that are hard to get through if you don't have that space to laugh and to make fun of and to make fun of yourself before anyone else can.
Freeman: I remember that opening scene of Caucasia where the two sisters who invented this language were driving around with their father and they're driving around and they're shouting out the window, "Black Power."
Senna: Black Power. Yes, I did that.
Freeman: Everyone's jumping. And it feels like it's a very prototypical Danzy Senna type humor where the funniest things that you do, there's a little edge to them, there's a risk and it feels like you cannot be earnest and be funny at the same time.
Senna: No, I think earnestness actually frightens me. I feel that there are so many lies embedded in earnestness that it's a dishonest position for me. And humor, it's the emotion and the state that I feel holds all of the other feelings that I want to express of rage or criticism or anxiety, sadness, all those other things are held in humor. And I was reading a book a few years ago that I ended up writing an introduction to Robert Plunket's, My Search for Warren Harding.
And I was realizing how few works of literary fiction are actually funny, because this was really funny and it's a little bit mean too. I think humor is mean when it's at its best, but it also is usually at its best when it's almost mean to the person who's speaking it. It's not mean to... It's not punching up, it's not punching down, it's punching oneself in the face. So I was realizing I was wanting to create this manic tone in my work that would reveal all the hypocrisies of every different world I was looking at. And to me, it was inherently funny, but also sad and also infuriating and all of those other things.
Freeman: Yeah, I love Colored Television for that reason. There's a lot of hypocrisies on display here, but especially Jane, the main characters. And for those who haven't read it, Jane is a novelist, many years late on her long overdue second novel, which is a unified field theory of what she calls the mulatto race, which is of pulling in things from the Melungeons of Appalachia to TV. And she's been given a house to house sit in the Hollywood Hills that's way beyond her income range.
She has a sabbatical, she's got to finish her book. She moves in there with her two kids and her husband, Lenny, who's an artist who paints abstract paintings that don't sell and don't make money. And she's in a state of high anxiety, finishes her book. And the inciting incident of this novel is that she turns it in, sends it out, and it gets returned with a crushing rejection letter, which sends Jane leaping towards the television industry, which she does by borrowing her friend's agent, who he hasn't introduced her to, and his own idea for comedy about mixed race Black and white family in LA.
So that's the setup for the book, and over the escalating tension is that Jane tells that lie, which is that this is her idea to the Hollywood agent, and it just starts a series of lies. And I want you to maybe talk just a little bit before you read about what lies do in a novel and why they're so explosive.
Senna: Yeah. Often when I'm reading my students' work and it's just not going anywhere, I say, "Can you make someone lie, please?" I've been teaching this class for years, called Passing and Performance in American Literature and Film, and we start with racial passing and then we go through all the ways that passing and pretending to be something you're not are a plot device, but also this persistent theme in American culture and narratives of American culture.
And going all the way to Hitchcock, every thriller hinges on a lie. I just watched Fatal Attraction again and I was like, "This is a great propulsive thriller with a lie at the center." And everything I love has a lie at the center. So it, I think, comes from some deep Freudian place in me like, "Why do I keep getting drawn to lies?" But I think that it's at the center of some of the best stories that I've ever read or experienced. So it keeps things dangerous really. I think the first draft of this, actually, Jane was not such a liar and the story had a stasis to it, and it was only when I started to make her as shady as the producer and as some of the other characters that it felt like the story found its pulse.
Freeman: Well, the lies made me sweat. I just thought, "Why did you do that? You could've just told him that you're working on the TV show, Jane." And Jane basically winds up lying to her husband that she's working on this TV show because he's being so supportive of her writing her novel. But it keeps you interested in a way because you think she's lying for survival in some kind of way. And it's not just simply a plot device. You bring it back to her childhood, her character being biracial, being a Black woman of mixed race who's sometimes mistaken for white, to some degree, and the fact that people perceive her very existence as some kind of lie.
Senna: Yes, it's like imposter syndrome on every single level that she's experiencing. Not only are they living in a house that's not theirs and pretending it's theirs, but she's having an affair, in a sense, on her husband with another world of lowbrow art or not art that he looks down upon. So there's so many levels of lying in this story that I had a lot of fun letting the lies pile up.
Freeman: Well, let's go back to the house because actually, before she moves in, she goes to a party at the house.
Senna: Yeah. I'll read a little bit from her memory of this house that they're now living in, but that she once visited, owned by this very wealthy showrunner named Brett. And her and her husband Lenny are now living in it. But this is a flashback. "Once, years ago, Lenny and Jane had attended a party at Brett's house in celebration of one of his successes, a series that had gotten greenlit or a pilot he just sold. Jane couldn't remember which. She did remember Piper, his wife, walking around the party in a silver dress serving drinks, and how all the other guests had bronze skin and blazing white teeth.
"Lenny and Jane were the only non-industry people in attendance. They had stood together in a corner feeling out of place, equal parts superior and ashamed. At one point, Jane had glimpsed their reflection in a gilded floor mirror and thought they looked like a pair of peasants who had wandered in off the street to beg for bread. On their way out, Lenny had grabbed a few cookies off a silver platter, wrapped them in a napkin and put them in his pocket. On the drive home, he had made his usual snide comments about Brett and Piper, the art on their walls. He called Brett a sellout, tragic mulatto, though Jane argued he wasn't as interesting as all that. He was just another hack cranking out zombie shows.
"She wondered aloud what it must be like to have such a white-looking child as Max. 'I mean, does one even consider him mixed race?' she asked. 'Hasn't all the Blackness been washed out?' 'It has for certain,' Lenny said. 'But when it comes time to apply for college, you just know Brett's going to tell him to claim he's some kind of Black kid. He'll drag out the old bylaws, the one-drop rule to make Max seem more interesting. That's how they do it. These wily mulattoes be blending into the furniture until Blackness seems like it might get you something.' 'God, are mulattoes just awful people?' Jane said. 'Not you. You're the last good mulatto. Brett from that Tiger Woods School of Cluelessness.'.
"Jane laughed, but silently, secretly, she had already been imagining what it would be like to live in a house like Brett's some day. She could see Lenny's art on the walls. She could see Lenny standing beside one of his paintings, discussing his work with a curator from Gagosian who wanted to give him a show. In her mind's eye, he was dressed in painter's chic, an Oxford shirt and cargo pants like those he was wearing, but of infinitely better quality. His artwork was the same as his artwork now, flashes of color overlaid on some image you couldn't quite make out but knew was there, the shape of a body lurking beneath a surface of color.
"But now the world understood what he was doing. They saw his brilliance finally. Jane was there in the fantasy standing before a table that held copies of her new novel. The book was an object, a real thing, alive outside of her, born. And her children were in the vision too, up past their bedtime. Ruby flitted among the guests in a pink frock with another little girl because in this dream, she'd finally lived in one place long enough to have a real best friend. And Finn was there standing on the step in a camel-colored blazer holding forth like a tiny professor lecturing a charmed cluster of guests on the history of the solar system." And I'll just stop there. Finn and Ruby are their children.
Freeman: I love that scene. The novel's storyboarded with her imaginings of what life could have been like, what it might be like, what it would be like if they lived in certain places. But it's also those imaginings are bouncing off the couple at the heart of the book, Lenny and Jane. And what I find, you could, in some ways, see your novels and your stories and your memoir as the ongoing project of a woman born, the first generation of parents who were legal to intermarry in 1968, as your parents did, where it was the first time a Black man and a white woman could get married and have children legally in Massachusetts.
And so you're like the midnight's children generation of interracial living. And one of the things this book does in such a profound way is look at intra-Black feelings about interracialness, especially in this scene where Lenny sometimes says some really hostile things in which Jane has to parry them back, and she often disassociates into fantasy. And I wonder if you could talk a little bit about the ways that Jane and this book, in particular, it's not like she's just having to deflect aggression from necessarily white people dealing with her and being racist. It's actually tension within worlds in which she's dealing with Blacks.
Senna: Yeah. I noticed recently when looking at all my work and all the six books I've written that progressively, white characters have become less and less a part of my narratives. Caucasia had the mother as a very large figure, but I think since then, I've been much more interested in people of color and the politics of us within ourselves. And I've noticed I don't set out to do that, but the white characters have become fewer and fewer. And I'm interested in all of the tensions within group. And I think about the Harlem Renaissance and the works that I most admire from that time, and the class divisions within the Black community that I see and I'm observing in this novel.
And I'm interested in looking at this moment, in particular, for people of mixed race and their relationship to the Black community, and the kind of ways that both have historically been really invisible and written out of the narrative of America and subsumed into a subgroup of Blackness, a extension of Blackness. Or we've been hyper visible in terms of you see us everywhere, but the narratives of what it is to be mixed, I don't think have really been told. And so I was interested in the ways that our adjacency to whiteness, our adjacency to privilege creates tensions within the Black community. But also for this producer, he sees it as a cash cow and an opportunity to exploit this identity that he hadn't seen written about or made into a show before.
So I was interested in all of those contradictions and then just the barbed humor of Lenny and Hampton, but also Jane. She's talking trash about mixed people all the time too, and only refers to being mixed as mulatto. I think she's going back to this question of humor and earnestness, and she's always speaking with 10 degrees of irony, as is her husband. And that's the world that I grew up in where race was never spoken about directly. It was spoken about with 10 degrees of levels of meaning beneath it.
Freeman: I want to bring in someone who knows a lot about these topics, but also is very funny herself, is a friend of yours, is a California-based writer who is Porochista Khakpour. She's the author of Sons and Other Flammable Objects, The Last Illusion, Brown Album, and most recently, Tehrangeles. Most impressively though, she's currently in a castle in Italy where it's probably 2:30 in the morning and is going to make complete and coherent sense as she asks you some questions. Porochista, come on to the California Book Club.
Porochista Khakpour: Hi, John. Hi, Danzy. I'm so honored to be here. Yeah, I just want to clarify, I'm not normally in a castle in Italy. I got a fellowship. This is not my house. I wish. But it's such an honor to be here and I just love hearing you speak. I scribbled so many notes that I don't even know where to begin, but I always want to start just to say a few words about how we met because I think it is always interesting to people. It never stops being interesting to me because I just love how long it's been, but I'm going to try not to age us too much. But I had the great honor of meeting Danzy in 1999. So that was when you were doing this great little guest professor stint at Sarah Lawrence. And back then, I think people didn't do one semester. You did a whole year.
So I think you'd committed to a visiting professor year or something at Sarah Lawrence. And I still remember the extreme enthusiasm that me and all the students had when we knew you were coming. I wish you could have seen it. I still remember when you were announced and we all ran to the bookstore and we got the book because it had been this big bestseller and we were so excited to read it. I think we all read it before. Sarah Lawrence College is one of these weird schools where you interview to get into a class and we pick the professors, but the professors also pick us.
It's one of these weird schools like that. I was a scholarship kid. I was very excited to be there, but I had a lot of confidence at that point as a writer. I felt I knew what I was doing. I had all my cool internships in the city. And then here it was, my last year, and I had this opportunity to study with this amazing writer. I still remember there was a group of lesbians who were like, "And she's hot." That was the part of-
Senna: That's my favorite detail of whenever you talk about this, and I'm glad you retold that.
Khakpour: There was a whole group, you had a lot of lesbians in that class. It was amazing.
Senna: A year after Caucasia came out and it was my first teaching job ever, and I had this completely crazy class of which Porochista was one of the students. And I think back to that class and how zany and wild it was. I would come in and tell them about things I shouldn't have been talking about, but it was the beginning of a beautiful friendship for me and Porochista.
Khakpour: I loved it. I thought it was so great. I think you gave us a lot of real life stuff. And we were at a school where people were often talking just about craft, but you also brought craft and other things in there. And we just-
Senna:And gossip. Right.
Khakpour: And gossip. Well, we all wanted to be you.
Senna: Because every novelist is a gossip at their core. So we love stories.
Khakpour: That's true. But I think we all knew at the time that you were only a few years older than us, so we had this desire to be you. You had this whole class of everybody who just wanted to be you.
Senna: That's why we're wearing the same glasses right now. It's a whole All About Eve thing.
Khakpour: I swear, I've had these for ages. But it's a compliment.
Senna: I love it. I love it.
Khakpour: If nything with us resonates, I'm like, "It's an honor. Thank you. That's incredible." But anyways, it continued. And so we were friends for ages and we stayed in touch. We got to do a poets and writers cover in 2010 that I always think about with a lot of fondness because that was a really fun interview. The photo shoot always cracks me up because it was so hard to keep it together because we're always laughing, and we always have a lot... The challenge right now for me is just not to make jokes. Like our text messages, I'm always howling with laughter as we're doing them.
And I loved... I don't know if it was in the Julian Lucas New Yorker article or where it was, but somebody noticed recently that when they hang out with you that you have a mischievous quality to you. And it's something that's in your work, but it's in your person too. And I just even noticed it today and I was like, "I think everybody who's around you can't help but want to be a bad kid with you," which is the delight of reading your works too.
This is actually my favorite book by you. I swore that New People was going to be my favorite book, and then before that, I said Symptomatic, and of course, I love Caucasia. Every book of yours is my favorite book. But this one especially, I felt that quality of being in the bad kids' chat with you and just cracking up and laughing and having inside jokes with you. And I feel like every reader has felt this. I've noticed people talking about that. Do you know that? Do you know what I'm talking about?
Senna: Yeah. No. I just gave a reading with someone and they said, "You seem really wicked. You're a wicked person." I was like, "I'm actually really a nice person." But my work, I'm channeling some more... The knives come out when I'm writing and it's got the veil of fiction, which is what allows you to do that, is that you've changed everything so much in the writing process that I think fiction has always had that function to allow us to be really brutally honest because we're wearing a veil and we're hiding behind a mask.
And that's why it's so freeing to me and why it's my favorite form to write in is that it allows all of this conflicting truths to play out on the page too. I'm not preaching one point, but I'm allowing all the characters to say every thought that's ever crossed my mind. And I don't have to own those thoughts. I could just let them sit in the mouths of my characters.
Khakpour: It's so nice. I don't know why people don't. Fiction to me is the only mode really. We've both done non-fiction too, but fiction for me, it's just that realm of delight and possibility where you can do all sorts of fun things and it's amazing. I have a few questions that actually I didn't get a chance to speak to you. And I just saw you at the launch in New York, which was amazing and whatever. I've been following the whole thing. It's been so exciting. And I love lately that it's on Good Morning America. I love that it's the cover of The New York Times Book Review.
It's so satisfying in this broken time to see a book get its due and to watch people. The contagious joy right now is very, very exciting. So I love this, but I have a boring question. If you don't want to answer boring questions just... But I don't think I ever got a sense of how you compose this book and over which period. Every time I read a book of yours, it feels so fluid. You managed to write on such a complex craft level, but they're always page-turners, so they look deceptively easy, I think, for some people. But I can see how difficult it must have been to write this. So I just was curious about the composition of it and how you went about it.
Senna: Yeah. No, I wanted it to feel... I like writing that feels very simple, but there's intricate workings underneath it. And I feel this book, it's interesting because you're a writer, so I think you sensed that labor. And I really started it before the pandemic when my family and I were living in a nursing home, which, if you read the novel, you'll see why that comes into it. And we were the only people under 85 living in this apartment, and this horrible experience where I was working with someone in Hollywood who was very wealthy and I was trying to impress them. And they wanted to give me their notes and they said, "I'll just come by and drop it at your house. You live in this neighborhood, I know it."
And I was like, "No, no, no, don't come to the house whatever you do," because I didn't want them to see that we were living in a nursing home. And the novel really began in that place where I was like, "This would be a funny place to bring this character." And so I started it and I was really having the best time of my life writing it. And then we moved out of the nursing home and two weeks later, the pandemic hit. Thank God we weren't in the nursing home when this happened.
Khakpour: Wow.
Senna: But I put this novel away for over a year. I don't remember exactly how long I put it away because it felt like the world was ending and I was so sad to be away from it, but it felt like we were living in an apocalypse. And when I finally sent my kids back to school, I pulled it out of a drawer and I felt such relief to be back in this space of manic joy and deviousness and all the things that I wanted to be in at that moment. And the world felt a lot sadder and diminished, but that felt like even more of a appropriate world to write satire into, was the deeply sad world that we were living in, actually. That felt like a appropriate reaction to these times.
Khakpour: Oh, I love that so much. I know the nursing home, so I have a good... It's across the street from the library that I used to write and I also still write in actually. So it's amazing. I love that that was written there. Well, that's another thing I wanted to ask you too. It's this whole thing about satire, we were talking about it the other day. And I think for so many people, there's a novelty in women of color writing satire, which to me is already such a weird concept. Why is it novelty? Every woman of color I've ever known is extremely funny, is extremely witty.
But I made a tweet a few weeks ago about someone should write a thing with my book, your book, Regina Porter's book. There's a whole bunch of books this year. There are rich people satires, and I think a lot of it came out of the madness around the pandemic era and the circus around it that highlighted how out of touch Americans of a certain class are and what their concerns actually are. But what do you think about this? I've noticed people talking about it. But are you feeling like, "I am a writer of satire"? And what does that bring up for you?
Senna: Well, you're from LA and know that in a way, this isn't satire. This is real. This is straight up LA, and it's not that exaggerated to be heightening that much. But I think comedy is about knowing where to put the white space, knowing where to end the sentence. It's not so much that you're exaggerating, but you're just leaving out the boring bits and highlighting something absurd. And I think sometimes satire can be really boring and flat. I like satire that has a human being in it or comedy that's still got a friction with a sadness or a rage and that's not just flatly comedic. And I think to me, there's no contradiction between being a woman and a woman of color and writing comedy because I think you're constantly reminded of the absurdity of your position in the culture.
And if you don't find a place to point that out and to laugh at it, it can destroy you. So for me, it feels appropriate. It feels organic to my position in the world. But I think that women, and women of color especially, don't get appreciated for that. It's not that it's not out there, but it's not seen or noticed. And I read the same scene of this book to two different audiences on my book tour, and it was very racially... one audience was really white and one audience was predominantly Black and same scene. And one audience looked at me with tears in their eyes and the other was laughing really hard. And I was like, "This is so interesting that this is landing completely differently."
Khakpour: Oh, yeah.
Senna: Do with that what you want.
Khakpour: Because I think earnestness, people expect the earnestness, right? And it's a little bit like, "Uh-oh, are we allowed to laugh? Can we laugh?" There's always that question in the US in particular. I love what you said about, "Maybe the trick is that we are punching towards ourselves," if you can call that a trick. I think for people, maybe there's a relief in that. But I was also thinking the other day about how much we have certain topics that we write about. I write a lot about Iranian American families. And in a way, they're also, I hate this term that my students always like to use, liminal space, but you know what I'm talking about, don't you?
Senna: Yeah.
Khakpour: Liminality, right? Do you feel like in your next book too that this is a topic? I keep thinking about this with myself. Am I going to continue to write about these topics, but in different forms? I feel like every book of ours does a different thing with ourselves, our identities. I don't think we recycle it the way that sometimes people are tempted to.
But I keep thinking, "What if I were to just write something completely boring?" And part of that is out of myself. And part of that's been my experience of working with Hollywood too, which I love how brilliantly you talk about here too. And I've learned a lot from you. You've given me a lot of good advice on that. I think that it does a weird thing to a lot of writers having that world, that industry alongside this industry because now you have two industries trying to tell you who you are and what you're doing. Does this make sense what I'm saying here?
Senna: Yeah. No. You may have this as well, but I've been told, again, since my first novel, "Are you going to write about mixed race characters again?" And it always seemed to be a predicament that I'm writing about when actually it's a geography in a land that every writer claims and every writer has a geography that they write from. And for me, every book, I'm writing about something completely different, but the space and the world that I'm writing from and the position that I'm writing from feel like the universal to me. I think we've always assumed white, straight male position is the universal. Historically, that's been seen-
Khakpour: Yeah, the default.
Senna: ... as the one that's not raced, that's not gendered when it's deeply raced and deeply gendered. And so for me, I just reject that fundamentally and feel like I can write every single human condition from the mixed race female point of view. That's not limiting to me in any way. And I remember making that choice very early on and feeling like I was going to filter my world and only allow people in who could see what I was doing.
Khakpour: Yeah. I just had somebody tell me, "Why do you want to continue to do this? You have this great choice to not write about this undesirable population," meaning Muslims or whatever they were trying to say. And I swear, I thought back to so many things that you've taught me over the years have given me the strength to handle some of those comments. But I actually responded to it with some humor too, because so often you just have to throw that question back to someone. It made me laugh actually.
And I think that's also been a great gift you've given a lot of your students, your friends, is the ability to get out of the very extreme drama of the industries and all that. And I'd love the discussion again of this in the book because I felt like Jane at many times. It hit home a lot. But I think again, that it's a great gift and I think it's very hard to know how to navigate this America sometimes. And I have to say, if I weren't in your class at that point, I don't know if I would've been able to navigate these industries.
I think Sarah Lawrence had put me in a really earnest and very anxious state. And so every time even talked to you, just hearing you and John speak too, you give people so much courage to be themselves and to actually delight in being themselves and to also laugh at this larger predicament we are in, which I think is just American culture, right? With all its haunted houses.
Senna: Well, one thing about Porochista is, she is from... Should I read a little bit more from the book?
Khakpour: Please. Can Danzy read, John?
Senna: John?
Freeman: Absolutely. I was going to say, we've been talking a lot about the way that you see the world and the way you can notice it and make fun, but we want to hear you do it. So if you have a different passage, I would love to hear you read.
Senna: Sure. Yeah. Thank you so much, Porochista.
Freeman: That was the most amazing ending too.
Senna: I love it. So I'm just going to read a very short bit. Jane is very aspirational. She wants to live in this neighborhood that I'm going to read you a little section about. "Today they were going to an open house in the neighborhood Jane had nicknamed Multicultural Mayberry, the neighborhood where she'd always wanted them to live. The house was way out of their price range, given that their price range was zero, but who really knew what their price range might be soon? It couldn't hurt to look. If Josiah offered a lot of money and Lenny sold some paintings on top of Jane's getting tenure and a raise, who knew.
"They might become members of the functioning middle class sooner than they thought. Multicultural Mayberry was only about 15 minutes from downtown Los Angeles, but it felt like a different world altogether. Gone was the Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome energy of downtown. Gone was the Manson family Helter Skelter vibe of the Hills. Gone was the suburban wasteland of Glendale and the trashy mini-mall sprawl of Mid-City. Gone was the relentless existential hum of the freeway, the racial blight of the LAPD, the handsome lying face of OJ Simpson and the blank, bewildered face of his murdered wife, Nicole. Gone was the banally evil face of Mark Fuhrman and the nihilistic cokehead teens of Less than Zero. Gone were the Menéndez brothers and the white vigilante Michael Douglas played in Falling Down.
"Movies over the years had depicted Los Angeles and its outskirts as a kind of dystopian futuristic hellscape, a clarion warning for the rest of the world about where we were all headed. But Multicultural Mayberry made it feel as if none of that existed. The most charming aspects of America's past had made love to its most hopeful Obama-esque future, creating this love child of a town." And I'll just stop there from that description. And a fun fact is that Porochista grew up in Multicultural Mayberry.
Freeman: So let's talk about that because there's several questions from the audience. Was it based on a specific LA community?
Senna: Yes, it is based on South Pasadena, which is a little hamlet just like I described, and it prides itself on being very multicultural and diverse and having these great blue-ribbon public schools. And people move here with their children because they want to live in this fantasy land. But one of the other funny details about it is that all of the movies and shows you've seen that everywhere in America are filmed in this neighborhood and they have a filming office.
And the first time I came here in October, in the heat of October in LA, they had a snow machine in the center of town and there was a snowman. And they were filming a scene with snow and it was supposed to be Ohio. So I loved the surreal quality to this neighborhood and how much it's used in 30-something TV playhouses that's here, Halloween, the original Halloween is here. Mike Myers killed his sister here. It's very LA.
Freeman: One of the most realistic portraits I found in the book is, of course, of Hampton, the producer that Jane's matched up with because he's just had a hit with a Black TV show and he's gotten a development deal with a producer-
Senna: A screening network.
Freeman: Yeah. And he's fascinated by her and he gloms onto her and workshops her ideas until you know where he's going. He's heading towards the mother load of all of her ideas, which, I'm not going to give it away. But I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that kind of person, not whether it's based on someone. But I've met a few producers and there's this incredible lack of boundary and externalization that eating in front of you while having a meeting is a power move. Can you just talk about what it's like to live in this world where you have to deal with people like this in your day-to-day life? I'm sure all of them are wonderful. Some of them are listening.
Senna: Yeah. I think before, where she meets with him, she's on the toilet that night before looking up his net worth because you can look up people's net worth. And when she first meets him, he's eating an egg white omelet, has a green smoothie and an assistant, a very beautiful Nigerian American assistant. And he's just come from his trainer and she thinks, "I want those things in my life. I want the green smoothie, the egg white omelet, the assistant, the trainer." She's just mesmerized by this man's casual wealth.
And he's also like the chosen Black person that Hollywood picks someone, plucks them and says, "You're going to be the gatekeeper, you're going to be our token who's going to pick diverse content and translate the world for us." And he's readily taking on this role of doing this and deciding where culture is made, how it's represented. And he sees her as this goldmine when he realizes that mixed race people are the fastest growing demographic in the United States, and she's going to be his guide to the land of mulattoes.
It's such an absurd situation, but I've found in all of my dealings in Hollywood that that's why I don't really see the book as satire, is that the most absurd things are spoken in those meetings and it's so boldly exploitative and capitalist. It's not under the surface. It's right there. And it's almost refreshing the first time you come up against that because I feel the literary world is a lot more coded, but when you go into these meetings, it's like, "How are we going to sell your race? And can we make this into something that will appeal to the broadest amount of people?"
Freeman: One of the funniest escalations in the book is the series of ideas that Jane coughs up under duress. Can you describe some of these?
Senna: Well, there's the Labradoodle episode where the husband in her show realizes that when he walks around with their giant Muppet-like Labradoodle, the police don't harass him. It's a neutralizing magical dog. She's trying to find episodes that are about race and deal with biracial issues, but she keeps missing the mark because they're not biracial enough and they're just a little too weird, a little too absurd to appeal to this broad market that he wants to appeal to. So I like the idea of failed pitches as a whole genre. And there's a lot about spitting into vials, how everyone mixed gets their 23andMe results and what that means when you get your numbers and all of that. She's trying to mine for comedy.
Freeman: And that's very different from Lenny is angry at her for having done that because her DNA is owned by... I think BlackRock bought biggest.
Senna: Well, she says that every mixed-race person cares more about solving the mystery of their identity than they do about getting away with murder someday because I realized that now they have my DNA, I can't commit these crimes.
Freeman: But you wrote a whole book though about your background because your family, your mother's side, they were professors at Harvard and published authors. Generations back, your grandfather was editor of The Atlantic. And on your father's side, there were stories...
Senna: And they were slave traders, my mother's family were.
Freeman: And slave traders.
Senna: Yes. Let's not forget.
Freeman: But to get to the bottom of your other side, it requires almost journal... two thirds of the book.
Senna: Yeah, it's really about my Black family and the mystery of that heritage, which has been systematically erased and discarded, whereas the white side was books written about street names, buildings named after. And then as a microcosm of American culture, I was looking at my family history.
Freeman: Well, I thought about that book a lot because as Jane is having these conversations with Hampton, she's trying to figure out which part of herself... She's giving him more and more ridiculous things, but she's also getting closer and closer, even if it's through a very refracted and distorted form of comedy to the heart of what her life is. It's about class anxieties, it's about marriage, and she's getting close to giving him everything that matters to her in some way, but in order to keep a job.
And I wonder when you've been dealing with Hollywood, which does ask a lot, how have you, if you can talk about it, set your own boundaries where you think, "You know what? That's actually the line where I think I'm off, I'm off this train or these are the things I want to talk about, these are the things I want to work about and these other things I'm not so interested in doing"?
Senna: Luckily, for me, I have a day job and I primarily think of myself as a novelist, and I still have hope in my world and future as a novelist. And I wanted to have a character who that hope was gone because I do think even what I'm doing in my fiction is I'm noticing a small, hideous part of myself. I'm taking that and I'm creating something out of that little glimmer of shame or degradation that I want to explore. And for me, the first time I had these meetings, I really believed everything they were telling me, all the hyperbole was like, "I'm a genius and what I said was brilliant and amazing."
Everything I said was lighting up the room, and then I would just never hear from these people again. And I thought it would just be funny to remove some of the safety nets and put her into this space where she's going to be very susceptible. And she's also already a very susceptible character, like I've shown with the psychic when she first meets her husband. She's someone who doesn't have a boundary with people. And the advice she gives to her students that writing teachers make it worse, and I think in some ways I was taking something that was already bad and seeing if I could push it a little further with Jane.
Freeman: Well, because it's 3:AM, I want to bring Porochista back on because we're winding down and as she comes back on, just want to read a comment from Naima Dean who wrote, "As a mixed-race adult born in '67 in San Francisco to a white mother and a Black father, I too have always identified as an other. Caucasia definitely spoke to me, but every title has been identifiable in some way, looking for a space of belonging as a multi-faceted mixed-race being. Who am I? Where do I fit? Am I white? Am I Black enough? Would it be different if my mother was Black and father white? How would life be different if?"
I wonder if that's something the both of you could speak to. Porochista, the Iran-Iraq War created your existence in America in a way. And you must also have, in a different sense, different from Danzy, but a similar sense, "My life would be different if this other thing didn't happen." And I wonder if you too exist in that sense of the multiverse.
Khakpour: I think about that a lot actually. There's a book project I'm working on here that actually directly imagines that actually, if I never came to the US or if the Iran-Iraq war never happened, the revolution never happened. And I think the idea always is that I would've still been a writer. We would've still been writers, but I'm exploring what if I wouldn't have been. What if I would've just been a housewife with kids? Not just house, but just different than what I am now, which is very much a Jane-like struggling writer who's taking Hollywood-
Senna: I feel like this character's triggering.
Khakpour: Right. You change everything for money. I'm in that place because everything Danzy is saying is so truly real. I just even made a Facebook post today after a Hollywood meeting last night that was about this, where I was just like, "Whatever you guys want, I guess." But also, I felt like it was refreshing, because what you say about the literary world is also very true. We don't ever really know where we stand with anyone in our communities because everybody's so polite or so coded, or the industry is so inscrutable, even for the people in it. There are so many unknowns and so many complications that it's almost liberating because it all cancels each other out.
Senna: Yeah. True.
Freeman: I still remember getting my first acceptance for a poem and I had to show it to my partner like it was a hieroglyphic. I was like, "Is this yes or no? I don't understand." And it was really, really convoluted. And I wonder, Danzy, living in LA, if you feel like you have a tiny buffer from these kind of things that Porochista was just talking about the willful inscrutability of an old, old industry.
Senna: Yeah, a couple of ideas around that. One is that I finished every single book I've written in Los Angeles. Even when I was living in New York, I came out here to finish Symptomatic. I finished Caucasia at UC Irvine in Southern California. Something about California has been very liberating for me as a writer, and it's allowed me to let go of some very oppressive histories that I was born out of. And also the city, it's both... I think Jane says at one point she's never felt as lonely or as free as she has in Los Angeles. And I find that there's something about the geography here that allows me to spend half of my life in a dream state, for better or worse.
I'm driving around thinking about my characters. The whole city is an industry based on lies, and that's been very somehow freeing for me as a writer. And I think that television also is an interesting form, and I do still work in it and play in it. I think it's doing some things around race and comedy and tonalities that the literary world has in it, but hasn't rewarded. So I find living between genres, it's actually very liberating for me. I think I can free up myself in either genre because I'm not committed to either. I don't know what that says about me, but I find that freeing.
Freeman: Well, I'm so glad that you have that space and that you take it to play because this book was just hours of enjoyment and fun. But it was also just such an adult pleasure. It made me think. It had deep psychology, it had real sex between a couple in the sense that sexy, awkward, but angry, but giving in. It's just so much about it that's wonderful. There's a lot of love for you in the chat here. We should let Porochista go to bed. It's 9:05, so we're out of time. But it's been a real pleasure, Danzy, talking to you about Colored Television.
Senna: Thank you so much.
Freeman: If you haven't read it yet, highly recommend it. You can also start here from way long ago. This is the other book.
Senna: Wow. That's an old drop. Yeah. Wow, that's cool.
Khakpour: Do the journey, read all of them. It's so fun, so satisfying.
Senna: Thank you. Thank you for all the wonderful writing about the book too. I got to see some of the essays in Alta, and they were just so smart. I saw things in the book I didn't know were there. So thank you so much for this. I feel this is my love letter of this book to California. Feels like this is-
Freeman: California definitely loves you back.
Senna: Thank you.
Freeman: Blaise, do you want to come and walk us out and tell people what to do now?
Zerega: Yeah. Well, just thank you everybody. Thank you. Thank you. What a great evening. Thank you, Danzy. Thank you, Porochista. Thank you, John. And thank you everyone who logged on. We had people from New Orleans, Boston, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Canada, everywhere. And so you've just been a great audience tonight. The program was recorded, so it will be published tonight on altonline.com. So come watch again, share the link. You'll also receive a thank you note in tomorrow's email with links to all the cool things that were discussed tonight.
And be sure to join us next month on October 17th. We'll host Tobias Wolff and This Boy's Life. We'll also be doing numerous events as part of the Bay Area's LitQuake Festival, including a live CBC event on October 18th at the Verdi Club. It's sure to sell out for those here in the Bay. So get your tickets now. It's going to be a really fun event. Freeman's going to be there.
And then the following day, we're also going to have a booth at the LitQuake Book Fair at Yerba Buena Center. And again, we'd really be honored if you could think about becoming a member. For $50, you get, again, our award-winning quarterly magazine. Look at all these great issues we do. And then we're also adding in the first five years of Altatude, which is the back page of our distinguished publication. So check us out or become a digital member for $3 a month. And again, this is my hat. I had to run upstairs and get it. You got multiple colors, got tote bags, the CBC, the Didion, you name it. Lots of cool merch. So check us out.
And I'm going to show you too, this is the next issue. So again, go visit altonline.com. Please support our partners, support Danzy, buy this book. It's really, really great. And finally, we'd be grateful if you would participate in a one-minute survey that's going to pop up on your screens as soon as we end the event. So thank you so much for tuning in tonight and stay safe and we'll see you next month. Take care. Bye-bye everybody.•
