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    Where Did You Sleep Last Night?: A Personal History
    Where Did You Sleep Last Night?: A Personal History
    Where Did You Sleep Last Night?: A Personal History
    Ebook203 pages4 hours

    Where Did You Sleep Last Night?: A Personal History

    By Danzy Senna

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    From the author of the bestselling Caucasia, a sad, revealing memoir of the mixed-race marriage of her parents, and the very different American origins that brought them together and pulled them apart.

    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 long buried 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.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateMar 30, 2010
    ISBN9781429964944
    Where Did You Sleep Last Night?: A Personal History
    Author

    Danzy Senna

    Danzy Senna was born in Boston in 1970. She graduated from Stanford University and received her MFA in creative writing from the University of California. FROM CAUCASIA, WITH LOVE is her first novel.

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    3.5/5

    25 ratings3 reviews

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    • 2/5
      The author's parents, both writers, but her mother a white woman from Boston and her father an African American man originally from the south, married in 1968. The marriage dissolved as the author's father became abusive and alcoholic. Senna's mother's family, Boston bluebloods, have a well-publicized history, but her father's history, and the roots of his frustration, are a mystery to her until she explores them as an adult. The book is touching and well-written, but it seemed to me the author didn't learn enough to really flexh out the social context well. I still felt rather mystified at the end.
    • 2/5
      I picked up this book because I liked its evocative title and because the review I read promised drama: the author’s parents“had the ugliest divorce in Boston’s history” at the end of their interracial marriage. Oddly, however, the book was muted and nondramatic. The author tries to figure out her heritage by tracing her genealogy. In Senna’s case, her mother’s family is well-documented; they were well-known Boston blue bloods (her description of their starchiness made me think I’d never fit in in Boston); her father’s family was African American and from the deep South. Senna’s grandmother Anna was particularly enigmatic; she left her children in an orphanage while she pursued higher education and a clandestine relationship with a Roman Catholic priest. Senna’s father grew up to be a gifted, yet embittered, abusive, alcoholic man. By the end of the book, however, we find out that he somehow did manage to turn his life around, has remarried and lives in Canada. Turns out there was lots of potential drama here, but in the telling, it is all rather flat, distant and uninvolving. Perhaps Senna should have written a novel about her family rather than a memoir. That way she could have filled in the blanks with her imagination and created a more satisfying book.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 3/5
      I wanted the ending to turn out different than it did. One frustrating book.

    Book preview

    Where Did You Sleep Last Night? - Danzy Senna

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