Where Did You Sleep Last Night?
“Danzy Senna provides a moving example of how not to place blame but to use the past to illuminate the complexities of the present…Senna’s third work is less a moody j’accuse than a gripping detective story, one in which the author travels from New England to New York to the Deep South, following the trail of her father’s upbringing in a quixotic effort to understand her own…The story of her unhappy family, she realizes, is also the story of a nation, one equally fractured but full of possibility.”
NPR
When Danzy Senna’s parents got married in 1968, they seemed poised to defy history. A white woman with a blue-blood Bostonian lineage and a black man raised by a struggling single mother, these two beautiful young American writers were boldly challenging long-held racial biases. When their marriage violently disintegrated eight years later, it was all the more heartrending given the hopeful symbolism of their union.
Decades later, Senna looks back at her parents’ divorce and their wildly opposing backgrounds and discovers two remarkable American histories. Digging deeper, she reconstructs a long-buried family mystery that illuminates her own childhood, her enigmatic father, the power and failure of her parents’ union, and finally, the forces of history.
Praise