Reviews

Where Did You Sleep Last Night? A Personal History by Danzy Senna

annexelizabeth's review against another edition

emotional reflective medium-paced

4.0

a thoughtful look at family, identity, and the stories we tell about ourselves and others. didn't love this one quite as much i loved caucasia, but it was still a solid read and interesting to see how she drew from her own upbringing in her fiction

exdebris's review against another edition

medium-paced

3.0

fusskins's review against another edition

I'm not sure what I think of "Where Did You Sleep Last Night?" as a book. I'm not even sure it is a book. It's more of a loosely woven tapestry of thoughts, recollections, feelings, musings and theories. Which is fine by me because this is a truly disturbing, interesting, beautiful, ugly American family saga. The likes of which is written about more often than it is examined. Senna does a good job of showing the futility of applying sociological analysis to real-life situations. When I went to see her speak about this book, she told a story of how a reader asked her how she could write such a negative portrayal of a black man. Her response was something along the lines of this is no 'black man." This is my father. This is what really happened. That very powerful, painful truth is what made kept me riveted throughout the book. Definitely worth reading. And discussing.

megabooks's review against another edition

challenging emotional reflective sad slow-paced

4.0

axmed's review

challenging funny informative reflective

4.0

So there were at least two versions of her: Nana, the small, silent woman in a housedress who shuffled around the house, cleaning and caring for children, saying her prayers and bothering no one—and Anna, the one who emerged in fragments of a story, an ambitious and educated black woman, who had been a bon vivant of the Louisiana jazz world of the thirties and forties and who had left all she knew in the South at some point and never looked back.


[something that the writer kept on saying was how US Americans are obsessed with race and she kept saying the same about her dad as well....this was really dissapointing as I'd expect the writer to know that this is a straight up right wing talking point] 

kather21's review against another edition

4.0

Digging up the family tree often leads to trouble.

extemporalli's review against another edition

5.0

In this compelling memoir, Danzy Senna recounts her parents' troubled marriage - her mother, a blue-blooded white Bostonian tracing her lineage back to the Mayflower and her father, a gifted black intellectual who came from, seemingly, nowhere. Senna speaks of the promise her parents' union represented - that of a future post-racial America - and its reality: her father's alcoholism, abusive behaviour, failure to provide any kind of support (including the financial), rejection, and plain old unreliability. Senna's disappointment and empathy towards her father make this memoir the compelling, brilliant and compassionate read it is, with her deciding fairly early on that her mother's ancestral history is so known it functions better as a foil against her father's family history: lost, like that of so many other black families whose lives have never been deemed worthy of historical record, to the mists of time and family hearsay. Senna also writes about what it's like to know that black families have never been a given or whole construct, have been brutalised for centuries, are as they exist the direct product of a legacy of slavery and forced separation, and juxtaposes that against how it feels to have a deadbeat black dad who knows all this, too, and throws it back in your face when you're trying to bring him to account for his horrible behaviour.

The story of Senna's search for her father's family and the truth of his ancestral history unfolds not unlike a mystery, with red herrings, revelations, and twists aplenty. Senna brings plenty of her own smart observations to the fore, which by the end of the book you come to understand as a function of her subject position within America's racial hierarchy and as the child of ugly divorce - observant, wise, with a cynical twist in her eyes:

Not long ago I met a woman, a poet and a scholar, about the same age as my mother. She recalled meeting my newly wed parents in the late sixties at a dinner party in Cambridge. She told me her impressions of them: they were radical, and looked down on the other dinner guests, who were not radical enough. And this too: "It was obvious they adored each other."

If there was one thing I would take away from this memoir, it's this perfect insight, this wonderfully crafted line:

We learn in school that the civil rights movement was about overcoming segregation. But as my father has pointed out to me, what an oddly neutral word - segregation to describe what was happening in this country. We prefer it to more blunt descriptions of that social arrangement: subjugation, oppression. And perhaps, also, we don't want to acknowledge the ways in which we were not segregated at all, the ways in which the lives of black and white people have always been intertwined at the most intimate level. Slavery was intimate. Oppression is so often an act of intimacy.

Should be required reading for high schoolers.

mustard_gurl's review against another edition

as i have famously said 8 million times before it takes me forever to read non fic, but i liked this book - it was slow at times to me, however Senna does an amazing job parsing her father’s past and trying to relate it to her childhood and their current relationship - a painful, real portrayal of how race and history effect a family

hayleehar93's review

challenging emotional reflective medium-paced

5.0

khayrenee's review against another edition

4.0

A wonderful portrait of a family fractured by divorce. Senna's story is honest and beautiful.