For both of my parents, it was very clear to them we were going to identify as Black — in a city as racist as Boston, in a country as racist as Ameri… - Danzy Senna

Novels are more like a marriage, stories more like affairs. A novel is something you live with for years and the characters in it become your second world, your second life. You think about them when you are not with them. You consider breaking up with them. You love them, you hate them. You fear them and avoid them and then run toward them and have a hard time extricating yourself from them. It’s such a whole body and mind experience that when it’s over and you are finally done, you experience real grief. Relief too, but also grief and a kind of identity crisis. You don’t know who you are without these characters to return to and wrestle with.

Writing is so hard. It’s terrifying. And yet, when it goes well, it’s magical – better than any drug. You write for that fleeting moment when you get to see your Frankenstein creation come to life.

Late in “Colored Television,” Jane returns to a passage by a (white) scholar whose study of mulattos influenced her doomed manuscript. “My life’s work has been to try to define a people that cannot be defined or even located — for the mulatto is the only race in our nation’s history that is perpetually shifting, changing colors, morphing into something unrecognizable,” the scholar writes.