The Heritage Month Project: Colored Television by Danzy Senna

My very first read for my Heritage Month Project, and Black History Month, was a good one, Colored Television by Danzy Senna. This novel was a Good Morning America Book Club Pick (there's some good stuff at that link) so it has had plenty of attention. I, however, didn't hear of it until I saw it on a list of humorous novels. As is often the case for me, while I liked the book very much, I had mixed feelings about how funny it was.

Jane, our biracial main character, is going through a desperate period. She teaches writing at a so-so college where she is at a crucial point. She has been on leave for a year where she is supposed to be finishing...and selling...her novel about mulattoes that she has been working on for ten years. If she can't sell it, she won't get tenure and will be stuck with the heavy workload that the untenured have to shoulder there. Additionally, her funny (yeah, he is funny) artist husband is talented, but his work doesn't sell. The family is constantly moving from one less than desirable living situation to another. One of their two children appears to be in the early stages of being diagnosed with a neurodivergent issue. (Seriously, that can take what seems like forever.) Jane's hopes for a black bohemian bourgeois life for herself and her family are all pinned on that book. That desire is intensified after having housesat for a year in her wealthy TV writer friend's home and experiencing the good life. 

I may not have found this book particularly funny because this white/failed middle grade writer/homemaker identified a lot with its mixed race/failed literary writer/academic. I mean a lot. I, too, am a woman writer who can no longer sell a book and is flailing around with other kinds of writing and has a little boy like Flinn in my family.  I found myself shouting to Jane in my head. "Come on, Jane! You wrote and published one book. You know another book isn't going to fix everything." "Jane! Jane! Don't drink all Brett's expensive wine!"

Jane leaves novel writing after it becomes clear her second book is dead before it even gets in the water. She finds it a relief. I have left novel writing, too, and Jane is right. It is a relief. Except all the little writing projects I come up with for myself can be overwhelming. And, wouldn't you know it, Jane comes up with smaller writing projects that are overwhelming her. Her's involve pitching a comedy show about mulattoes to a Hollywood wheeler and dealer named Hampton Ford.

Now Hampton Ford is also desperate. He complains that the ideas Jane pitches him aren’t mulatto enough, that they’re about random things and the characters she's talking about don’t have to be mulatto. They could be anybody.  I wonder, is that why this book grabs me and evidently a lot of other readers? Is this a book about a mixed-race woman living a desperate life, writing a book about mulattoes, pitching ideas about mulattoes, but she could be anybody?

She could be so any of us?