Colored Television

by Danzy Senna

An intelligent, funny, facetious and profound satire on the worlds of literary writing and television. Jane, the protagonist who describes herself as Mulatto, is attempting to “write a history for a people without a race”. As her career as an academic and an author fails, she tries to be a TV writer. A fun book for anyone involved in the world of publishing, Colored Television is compelling reading that shreds the values of television and the Hollywood dream it perpetuates. Senna also has a lot to say about money, art, class and parenting, but what I love most is that alongside all her clever and often lacerating humor, we get to feel how hard it is not to fit in, to be married, and to long for a life that offers the kind of middle class stability that Jane never had as a child.