Late in “Colored Television,” Jane returns to a passage by a (white) scholar whose study of mulattos influenced her doomed manuscript. “My life’s wor… - Danzy Senna

I think all serious artists at some point waver in their self-belief. But you also have to have those moments when you are deluded enough to believe that some crazy thing will work out. Even if it means returning to what you intended to do to begin with.

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 America, that the identity in us that needed protecting and shoring up was our Black identity. It wasn’t the white side of us.

With my first novel, when I was having such a hard time letting it go, I remember my brother saying to me, “It’s just a record of your creative mindset in a particular moment. You can’t drag it into the next moment. Let it be a record.” That was very helpful to me in terms of letting go – understanding there is no perfect version of the novel, there is only a time and place you wrote it as well as you could, reflecting your preoccupations, and then you move on.