Danzy Senna’s Book Recommendations

Welcome to Shelf Life, ELLE.com’s books column, in which authors share their most memorable reads. Whether you’re on the hunt for a book to console you, move you profoundly, or make you laugh, consider a recommendation from the writers in our series, who, like you (since you’re here), love books. Perhaps one of their favorite titles will become one of yours, too.

Colored Television by Danzy Senna

<i>Colored Television</i> by Danzy Senna

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Danzy Senna may have a few things in common with main character Jane in her latest novel and California Book Club selection, Colored Television (Riverhead), but being a biracial novelist living in SoCal is about where the outward similarities end.

The Boston-born and -raised, L.A.-based Senna is the author of 5 other books, including her bestselling debut novel, Caucasia, which won the Stephen Crane Award for Best New Fiction, the American Library Association’s Alex Award, a Whiting Writers Award, and was an Orange Prize nominee. She teaches English and creative writing at USC (she’s also taught at Sarah Lawrence); thought she’d become a doctor but failed organic chemistry and switched to American Studies at Stanford (she’d be a lawyer if she weren’t a writer). She got her MFA at University of California, Irvine, where she wrote Caucasia; lived in Fort Greene in Brooklyn, surrounded by businesses from Spike Lee, Tracy Chapman, and Alice Walker. She is the daughter of white lefty Bohemian poet Fanny Howe of Mayflower stock (salmon and arugula) and Black Beacon Press editor Carl Senna from the South (ribs and mac and cheese) whose divorce she chronicled in the memoir, Where Did You Sleep Last Night?; she roomed with writer Porochista Khakpour after Khakpour took her fiction workshop at Sarah Lawrence; temporarily lived, with her family (writer husband Percival Everett, an English prof at USC, and their two sons), in a nursing home while their house was being renovated; is a recipient of the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature and two MacDowell Fellowships

Good at: Last lines.

Bad at: Fact-checking (she worked at Newsweek before grad school); creating a space (she’s not a visual person); reacting to success.

Likes: Comedy and Bookbinders Design notebooks, where she writes first drafts of novels longhand, first discovered in France.

Fascinated by: Jonestown (she has the album recorded in Guyana).

Fan of: Artist and friend Laylah Ali.

Workout: Kundalini yoga.

Attached to: The idea of uncertainty and incompletion.

Be sure to finish her book recs below.

The book that:

…helped me through a breakup:

Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. It was my first Murakami and afterwards, I read six more of his novels, one after another—devoured them in bed. I was trying to forget a boy who didn’t love me. I took imaginative exile to Tokyo—where I sat at bars downing sake with a series of disaffected, lonely bachelors—men who were always longing for a missing woman and pondering unsolvable mysteries. Murakami is such a vibe.

…kept me up way too late:

Enduring Love by Ian McEwan. Baby Reindeer for an earlier era. One of the greatest opening scenes of all time.

…made me weep uncontrollably:

Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White. I famously memorized the last lines when I was a little girl and would walk into the kitchen and recite them to my mother just to make myself weep. I could not believe that words on a page could make me feel so much—could make me grieve a spider so deeply.

…I recommend over and over again:

Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee. Trigger warning: The protagonist is a racist misogynist living in a post-reconstruction South Africa, trying to hold onto his fading white male heterosexual power. Problematic, dated perhaps—but I still hold that it is one of the most elegant and brilliantly written novels of the 20th century. If you want to know how to write a novel about identity that reads like a thriller, I encourage you to study this book.

...shaped my worldview:

A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh. There is a French term for cold-bloodedness—sangfroid—that this work epitomizes. To write good social satire, you have to be brutal, detached, disloyal to yourself and your own people. You have to allow bad things to happen to your characters. Not a soul is spared in this lashing social satire of the British upper class living in the pre-World War II years. Waugh in this book taught me to never succumb to sentimentality and to fight the urge to spare my main character from trouble, even if and especially if she resembles me.

…I’d give to a new graduate:

Alexander Chee’s How To Write an Autobiographical Novel. I find my Gen Z and even Millennial writing students are often confused by the relationship between fiction and memoir. Chee, poetically, gorgeously, explores the ways a character we write in fiction can both be us and not us.

…I’d like turned into a TV show:

My own story collection, You Are Free. I am working on this very adaptation with a dear friend…and having a blast finding a new way to give these stories a new life.

...has the best opening line:

“They shoot the white girl first...” Paradise by Toni Morrison. (Great first novels are packed with unanswered questions. Who is “the white girl?” Who are “They?” And why do they shoot her first and who do they shoot next? You just know that it’s going to be good and also that the author is not afraid to go there.)

...has the greatest ending:

The last lines of Nella Larsen’s Quicksand, where she turns being what we now call a “tradwife” into a fate worse than death: “And hardly had she left her bed and become able to walk again without pain, hardly had the children returned from the houses of the neighbors, when she began to have her fifth child.”

…broke my heart:

The Easter Parade by Richard Yates. Like the protagonist of this novel, I am one of two sisters who were, as girls, caught up in a brutal divorce. This is an unlikely feminist novel written by an alcoholic male genius, Richard Yates. He writes with such shocking insight and sensitivity about the impossible choices available for women—between dangerous lonely freedom and oppressive deadly domestic life.

…features a character I love to hate:

The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith. Oddly, it’s not the serial killer, Tom Ripley, who I hate but his rich, entitled victims—Dickie Greanleaf and Marge and Freddie Miles. I find myself always rooting for Ripley to get away with everything.

…helped me become a better writer:

Joan Didion’s Play It As It Lays, one of my favorite books ever. She breaks every rule of craft here—randomly switches points of view a few chapters in, indulges in long sections of exposition, has no real plot, in the same way the main character, Maria Wyeth, has no real direction. She taught me you can get away with anything if you do it well enough.

…is a master class on dialogue:

Lorrie Moore’s Birds of America. There’s nobody who writes snarky, hilarious dialogue better than Lorrie Moore. Her stories are to die for.

...I’ve re-read the most:

The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man by James Weldon Johnson. I wrote my undergraduate thesis on this book and have taught it over the years. Each time I am struck by some new surprising subtext. A beautiful, strange novel about self-erasure and passing that was published first anonymously, falsely, as a memoir, then later with the author’s name on it as a work of fiction.

...I consider literary comfort food:

Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston. I have read this so many times and every time I love it more.

…I would have blurbed if asked:

Another Word for Love: A Memoir by Carvell Wallace—and actually, I did blurb it! I was so struck not only by his language but by how urgent this book felt, and so few books ever feel urgent.