I think it’s always true for every writer that your debut novel stands on its own, but your second novel is always seen in relation to what came befo… - Danzy Senna

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.

I was making fun of the fact that the people with the least financial reward – the smallest piece of the pie – fight the most viciously amongst themselves. In other words, poets. There is no practical or market value to what poets do. It’s probably the purest form of writing in the artistic sense, but perhaps because of this, it’s the most ego-driven. Don’t get me wrong, I love poets, but there is a level of snark in that world that puts to shame any other genre. Novelists are second – almost as bad as poets about one another. I’ve never seen anyone get so much deep pleasure as a novelist reading a terrible review of another more successful novelist. Television is unlike poetry or fiction in that it’s a collaborative art. And because of this, amongst TV people there’s less viciousness on the surface. At least Jane [the protagonist of her novel Colored Television - Wikiquote] thinks so. But just beneath that smiling surface, there’s something maybe more dangerous.

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.