Danzy Senna Quotes
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Writing New People I was thinking a lot about the era that I came of age - the 90's. Brooklyn, in particular, this moment when I lived there. The sense of possibility. I was also trying to find a way to write about Jonestown. I had read about it a lot and I had the sense that the story could really start to drive one over the edge.
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I think cults never stop being interesting and I'm intrigued by how we all do a tiny bit of submitting to a larger group - and how they can sneak up on you.
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I wrote the first draft of the New People quickly but it had been percolating a lot longer. It's a hard question to answer because I'd been working on another novel for years and when I gave up on that, this one came very easily. But I think the work had been going on a lot longer than the actual writing.
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I had been really obsessed with Jonestown for a long time - many years - and had read everything there was to read about it, seen all the footage and the documentaries. I found it really chilling in a personal way - the question of people submitting all their personal power and agency and independent thought it the name of a group or ideology. I could not find a way to write about it directly that didn't feel too heavy.
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It’s funny. When you leave your home and wander really far, you always think, ‘I want to go home.’ But then you come home, and of course it’s not the same. You can’t live with it, you can’t live away from it. And it seems like from then on there’s always this yearning for some place that doesn’t exist. I felt that. Still do. I’m never completely at home anywhere.
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I'm increasingly less interested in classic storylines and that arc that we have come to expect.
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I don't like stories that are too neat and too resolved. I think resolutions can be deadening for the reader.
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I think about some of the novels I love - The Stranger, Disgrace, Quicksand and Passing, Giovanni's Room, The Talented Mr. Ripley. I think I'm more intrigued by characters who don't do the right thing and where we are allowed to identify with their shame/dishonesty/envy... whatever.
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I find myself speaking through the other characters, putting ideas in their voices and heads. Writing almost becomes a splitting of myself into multiple personalities. But I don't write to make an argument on behalf of any of the characters, or to prove anything about a character. I think that's important that I be serving the story first and not my own point of view.
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I definitely feel like when I write a book it's not my job to police or guide the readers. The book and the characters don't belong to me anymore. If that makes sense.
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I was influenced growing up by everything from Harlequin romances to Fedor Dostoyevsky and Albert Camus, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and later Lydia Davis, Mary Gaitskill, bell hooks.
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In terms of music, each novel is different but I usually find my way into an era through the music. In this novel the New People, I listened to a lot of 90s hip-hop, which was just so genius. Also, all the musical references in the book from the Peoples Temple one and only album to Luther Vandross.
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I guess the subject of race is so natural to me I never think of it as hefty. It's something I talk about and joke about and discuss with my loved ones every day of my life.
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I didn't read about it for school. It was just for myself. I was interested in cults in general but Jonestown was the most interesting of all the cults I studied.
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I'm not trying to be coy, but I think everyone notices these things like skin color but some people are more aware that they are noticing them than others, maybe. If that makes sense.
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Motherhood. It was hard to get lost in anything else completely when children were 3 years old.
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My fear was like a stray dog, roving the neighborhood of my life, looking for a new source of worry.
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I'm felt I was writing about love and desire and community and belonging and grief and a whole host of other issues. But race is never far from the surface.