Where Did You Sleep Last Night?

When she got married in 1968, Fanny Howe, a poet and novelist descended from a long line of prominent white Americans, wore a gold lamé minidress. Her husband-to-be was Carl Senna, a handsome black writer born of poverty and uncertain parentage. Taking place just one year after the Supreme Court overturned the country's last anti-miscegenation laws, their union was about much more than two people—it was celebrated as a kind of community achievement.

In her stirring new memoir, Where Did You Sleep Last Night?, their daughter, Danzy Senna (author of the novels Caucasia and Symptomatic), sorts through the wreckage of that marriage, which collapsed into disappointment and violence when she was a child. In coming together, she reflects, her parents "tried to shed their respective origins," raising their children "in a state of willful amnesia." But those origins refused to be so blithely cast off.

A fine storyteller, Senna scrutinizes old photographs, tracks down distant family members and initiates an awkward road trip with her charismatic, volatile father, in which they drive through the South in search of the truth about his tattered past. Her clear-eyed pursuit of her father's story is driven by a sense of responsibility as much as by curiosity, complicated by that fact that their relationship is excruciatingly strained. Caught between her parents' divergent histories, Senna finds her own identity at odds with itself, despite having been cultivated in a sort of bohemian "new world order." Senna relates these winding, uncertain stories with a sense of quiet devastation. She's as fiercely driven to unearth her parents' pasts as they were eager to rise above them. —Eryn Loeb

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Senna talks with Rebecca Walker Wed 27.

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