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Values and Desires: A Guest Post by Danzy Senna

By Danzy Senna / August 23, 2024 at 1:44 am

Danzy Senna (Caucasia and New People) returns with a sharp, witty and wry account of a novelist’s highs and lows trying to make it as a writer in Hollywood. Discover the inspiration behind this cutting tale and Danzy’s own perspective of Hollywood in her exclusive essay, down below.

Hardcover $24.00 ~~$29.00~~

Colored Television: A Novel (Barnes & Noble Book Club Edition)

By Danzy Senna

In Stock Online

Hardcover $24.00 ~~$29.00~~

Get everything you’ve ever wanted and lounge on borrowed time in Hollywood until it turns you upside down. Danzy Senna’s quick wit and wry voice has the big-heartedness of Dolly Alderton and the sensibility of Sally Rooney; readers of Miranda July’s All Fours and Kiley Reid’s Come and Get It will want to tell all their friends about this smart and sharp tale.

There are autobiographical origins to all fiction. The spark for Colored Television came when I first started dabbling in Hollywood years ago. As a literary novelist, I had been plugging away on books for all these years, living in LA but somehow avoiding this giant, glittering, story-making machine behind me.

When I finally first dipped my toe in the Hollywood waters years ago, I noticed it had this very manic-making impact on my life. There was so much hyperbole showered on me. Directors and producers told me, “I love you, you’re a genius.” When you’re a lowly novelist and you hear this the first time, you almost believe it. I got interested in this dynamic between Hollywood and the class of underdog, almost-broke novelists who pepper the city.

But Colored Television is about much more than Hollywood: it’s about the lies people tell themselves about their own values and desires, and how our lies get revealed to us, particularly in middle-age, late into a marriage. Jane’s husband identifies as an outsider and doesn’t care about the more mainstream dreams of wealth, stability and mainstream success. Jane has been posing with him as this same kind of artist. But working in Hollywood reveals to her these suppressed, secret parts of herself that crave more conventional bourgeois things – stability, comfort, beauty, ease of living, a nice home.

Jane is, like me, mixed race, and I’m always interested in how race complicates the dynamics of marriage, class, ambition. Part of Jane’s struggle is that she has lived in the margins of the culture her whole life, being neither/nor, feeling invisible as a mixed writer and person in a racially binary American society. This only adds to her desperation to be seen, to be no longer marginalized but in the center of the story of America.

She desires money and visibility and mainstream success. And into this setting walks a powerful man, a producer, promising to change her life — not only to lift her into the glittering tower of Hollywood, where wealth and fame are possible, but to make mixed race people seen and heard on a much grander scale. The novel explores how far Jane will take things with the producer in order to make the dream a reality – and what it will cost her.