When Danzy Senna's parents married in 1968, they seemed poised to defy history: two beautiful young American writers from wildly divergent backgrounds―a white woman with a blue-blood Bostonian lineage and a black man, the son of a struggling single mother and an unknown father. When their marriage disintegrated eight years later, the violent, traumatic split felt all the more tragic for the hopeful symbolism it had once borne.
Decades later, Senna looks back not only at her parents' divorce but at the histories that they had tried so hard to overcome. In the tradition of James McBride's The Color of Water, Where Did You Sleep Last Night? is "a stunningly rendered personal heritage that mirrors the complexities of race, class, and ethnicity in the United States" (Booklist).

Where Did You Sleep Last Night?: A Personal History

Biographies & Memoirs

SENNA, DANZY

Community & Culture

Picador

When Danzy Senna’s parents got married in 1968, they seemed poised to defy history. They were two brilliant young American writers from wildly divergent backgrounds—a white woman with a blue-blood Bostonian lineage and a black man, the son of a struggling single mother and an unknown father. They married in a year that seemed to separate the past from the present; together, these two would snub the histories that divided them and embrace a radical future. When their marriage disintegrated eight years later, it was, as one friend put it, “the ugliest divorce in Boston’s history”—a violent, traumatic war that felt all the more heartrending given the hopeful symbolism of their union.
Decades later, Senna looks back not only at her parents’ divorce but beyond it, to the opposing American histories that her parents had tried so hard to overcome. On her mother’s side of the family she finds—in carefully preserved documents—the chronicle of a white America both illustrious and shameful. On her father’s she discovers, through fragments and shreds of evidence, a no less remarkable history. As she digs deeper into this unwritten half of the story, she reconstructs a longburied family mystery that illuminates her own childhood. In the process, she begins to understand her difficult father, the power and failure of her parents’ union, and, finally, the forces of history.
Where Did You Sleep Last Night? is at once a potent statement of personal identity, a challenging look at the murky waters of American ancestry, and an exploration of narratives—the narratives we create and those we forget. Senna has given us an unforgettable testimony to the paradoxes—the pain and the pride—embedded in history, family, and race.

Farrar. Straus and Giroux

Named a BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW, VOGUE, TIME MAGAZINE, NPR and THE ROOT Named A 2017 BEST SUMMER READ BY Vogue • Elle • Harper's Bazaar • Glamour • Buzzfeed • In Style • Men's Journal • Bustle • Ms. Magazine • Pop Sugar • Newsday • The Millions • Time Out • Bitch • CNN's The Lead• The Fader "[A] cutting take on race and class...part dark comedy, part surreal morality tale. Disturbing and delicious." -People "You’ll gulp Senna’s novel in a single sitting—but then mull over it for days.” –Entertainment Weekly "Everyone should read it." –Vogue From the bestselling author of Caucasia, a subversive and engrossing novel of race, class and manners in contemporary America. As the twentieth century draws to a close, Maria is at the start of a life she never thought possible. She and Khalil, her college sweetheart, are planning their wedding. They are the perfect couple, "King and Queen of the Racially Nebulous Prom." Their skin is the same shade of beige. They live together in a black bohemian enclave in Brooklyn, where Khalil is riding the wave of the first dot-com boom and Maria is plugging away at her dissertation, on the Jonestown massacre. They've even landed a starring role in a documentary about "new people" like them, who are blurring the old boundaries as a brave new era dawns. Everything Maria knows she should want lies before her--yet she can't stop daydreaming about another man, a poet she barely knows. As fantasy escalates to fixation, it dredges up secrets from the past and threatens to unravel not only Maria's perfect new life but her very persona. Heartbreaking and darkly comic, New People is a bold and unfettered page-turner that challenges our every assumption about how we define one another, and ourselves.

New People

Literature & Fiction

United States

Riverhead Books

Colored Television (A GMA Book Club Pick): A Novel

Caucasia

Genre Fiction

Demco Media

FOR USE IN SCHOOLS AND LIBRARIES ONLY. Explores the complications of race through the story of two daughters--one light-skinned and the other dark-skinned--of a black father and a white mother, who are divided by racial allegiances.

Caucasia (Turtleback School & Library Binding Edition)

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Turtleback Books

Literary

Hodder Headline

Caucasia: A Novel 6c

Riverhead Trade

Birdie and her sister just want to be normal but it's difficult growing up with a black academic father and a white activist mother. Soon her parents' relationship becomes strained and they split, Cole going to Brazil with her father, while she goes on the road with her mother as they flee the FBI.

From Caucasia With Love

Bloomsbury Pub Ltd

Caucasia is a remarkable, affecting story of the complicated legacies and imprimaturs of race, and in this sense is a quintessential American tale. Rich with eccentric, impassioned figure, this wonderful novel's starting narrative of a young girl's childhood among, in turn, black militants and white suburbanites is alluring and suspenseful, and considers the difficult questions of what truly is the 'color underneath.'

CAUCASIA.

RIVERHEAD. NY 1998

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