The novelist and poet Jim Harrison once said, “I thought, frankly, that it would be more pleasant to write a memoir than it was.”
It’s a simple and powerful statement, and one that Danzy Senna, a self-described fiction writer who set out to discover her family’s roots and recently published an account of the endeavor (which she describes not as memoir but as a personal history, even telling people while writing the book that she was working on a ‘history book’) Where Did You Sleep Last Night, can probably identify with. She described the book as being a little monster in the corner, howling for her to continue it when she worked on her fiction.
But judging from the excerpts Danzy read last night at Baruch College, the final product is anything but monstrous. Even when taken in bits and pieces her writing has the quality of the voice of an old friend opening up–that is, if the friend in question is a masterful storyteller. The scenes are constructed so vividly that they become as accessible as if they were the reader or listener’s own recollections.
Where Did You Sleep Last Night, which is named for one of Senna’s favorite songs, chronicles her journey to uncover her mother and father’s personal histories accompanied by anecdotes from her own life in which she explores the themes of race and perception that pervade society.
Raised by her white, blue-blood Bostonian mother, Senna had limited contact with her half-African American half-Mexican father. Along with her brother and sister, she was caught in the middle of the dissolution of her parent’s relationship, and so she also inevitably recounts the pain of being a child of two people who have very few good things to say about each other. At the reading she said, “A child has to love both parts of themselves… it is a form of child abuse to put children in the middle of a divorce.”
Never truly being able to know who her father was is what sparked Senna’s incredible journey, but she admits that he was understandably not happy about the book–which makes her writing and publishing of Where Did You Sleep Last Night all the more brave.
And though it is a work of non-fiction, the startling truths Senna discovers about her family are presented in a way that would make any author of thrillers or mysteries proud, and her subsequent revelations would make any philosopher feel the same.
But no spoilers here– you’ll have to read the book to find out for yourself.