Writers writing about writers can feel cliché.

But Danzy Senna’s Colored Television sidesteps the usual narcissism by turning the writer’s struggle into a broader meditation on identity, ambition, and the performance of Blackness in a society obsessed with categorization.

I enjoyed this novel because in the protagonist, Jane Gibson’s journey, I saw echoes of my own.

Jane has high hopes. She’s finally living the writer’s dream: house-sitting a multimillion-dollar Hollywood Hills mansion, on sabbatical from her university job, and working to finish her second novel, a sweeping epic that her artist husband dubs her “mulatto War and Peace.”

After ten years of literary labor, Jane’s book is met with indifference and makes her wonder if she has what it takes to be a real writer.

In an act of desperation, she turns to Hollywood. Jane links up with Hampton Ford, a big-time producer who sees her as his “authentic” voice. Together, they begin developing the Jackie Robinson of biracial comedies.

What starts as a dream collab quickly becomes a surreal descent into commodified identity politics, microaggressions, and a quest to fully understand what it means to be mulatto, at least from Jane’s perspective.

Senna’s satire lands hard because it’s coming from a place of deep, earned knowledge. She’s been in those rooms. She knows what it means when they say they want your story, but only if it fits their checkbox-friendly, algorithm-approved version of racial identity.

One of the most resonant themes in Colored Television is the question: What is Black art? And more specifically: Who gets to define it? Jane tries to write a serious, nuanced, historically grounded novel about mixed-race identity, and no one wants it.

But pitch a quirky, high-concept sitcom with a catchy title and a light-skinned lead, and suddenly she’s got a meeting.

This theme also reminded me of Erasure, Percival Everett’s novel (Senna’s real-life husband), which explores the same exhausting terrain. I don’t think the thematic overlap is accidental. Instead, I think it’s a conversation between spouses, across books, about what it means to create while Black in America.

The novel also wrestles with marriage, art, and ego.

Jane’s husband, Lenny, is a brooding, serious artist who dreams of escaping American racism and having his art appreciated by moving to Japan. He creates abstract art to hide his identity from those who want to exploit it. Ironically, he finally finds success when he embraces his true self.

Their marriage is messy at times but their bond is solidified by three things: art, their children, and their shared hatred of things which include dignity, earnestness, poetry readings, white feminism, Black writers who have made it their whole mission to placate white guilt,’ and, notably, ‘redemptive endings.’

Therefore, Colored Television’s ending is not traditionally redemptive.

Jane doesn’t “win” in the Hollywood sense. There’s no breakout show, no glowing validation from the industry, no cathartic speech that ties everything together.

Instead, Senna offers something more honest: a quiet reckoning.

Jane acquires an awareness of how race, class, art, and ego have shaped her path, and how much of herself she’s lost along the way. It’s a murky, unresolved ending that resists feel-good closure.

If you’re a writer, a creator, or someone who’s ever tried to tell your truth in a world that would prefer a version with less truth and more gloss, read this book. It’s sharp, funny, and painfully accurate.

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