McMillan, Terry (L.) 1951-

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McMILLAN, Terry (L.) 1951-

PERSONAL: Born October 18, 1951, in Port Huron, MI; daughter of Edward McMillan and Madeline Washington Tillman; married Jonathan Plummer, September, 1998; children (by Leonard Welch): Solomon Welch. Education: University of California, Berkeley, B.S., 1979; Columbia University, M.F.A., 1979.

ADDRESSES: Agent—c/o Author Mail, Viking Penguin, 375 Hudson St., New York, NY 10014.

CAREER: Writer. University of Wyoming, Laramie, instructor, 1987-90; University of Arizona, Tucson, professor, 1990-92.

MEMBER: PEN, Author's League.

AWARDS, HONORS: American Book Award, Before Columbus Foundation, 1987, for Mama; National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, 1988.

WRITINGS:

Mama, Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 1987.

Disappearing Acts, Viking (New York, NY), 1989.

(Editor) Breaking Ice: An Anthology of Contemporary African-American Fiction, Viking (New York, NY), 1990.

(Author of introduction) Spike Lee, with Ralph Wiley, By Any Means Necessary: The Trials and Tribulations of the Making of Malcolm X … including the Screenplay, Hyperion (New York, NY), 1992.

Waiting to Exhale, Viking (New York, NY), 1992.

How Stella Got Her Groove Back, Viking (New York, NY), 1996.

A Day Late and a Dollar Short, Viking (New York, NY), 2001.

The Interruption of Everything, Viking (New York, NY), 2004.

Contributor to Five for Five: The Films of Spike Lee, Stewart, Tabori, 1991. Contributor of short stories to periodicals.

ADAPTATIONS: Waiting to Exhale was adapted for audio cassette, narrated by Terry McMillan, and as a motion picture starring Whitney Houston and Angela Bassett, Twentieth Century-Fox, 1996; How Stella Got Her Groove Back was adapted as a film starring Bassett, Whoopi Goldberg, Taye Diggs, and Regina King, Twentieth Century-Fox, 1998; Disappearing Acts was adapted for a film by Home Box Office, 2001; A Day Late and a Dollar Short was adapted for audio cassette, Penguin Audiobooks, 2001.

SIDELIGHTS: Terry McMillan's character-driven novels, most of them best-sellers, have drawn an audience of all ages, races, and genders. McMillan has a talent for confronting universal themes such as romantic commitment, family obligations, and relationships between parents and children, in ways that resonate in her readers' lives. To quote Anne Bowling in Writer's Yearbook, "The women McMillan crafts draw readers by the millions. These characters seem familiar enough to walk through your apartment door, drop a Coach bag on the coffee table and flop down on the couch for a chat." Booklist correspondent Vanessa Bush commended McMillan for her "distinctive style of unveiling the trials and mishaps of modern-day life for black folks." Loosely based on her own life experiences, such novels as Waiting to Exhale and How Stella Got Her Groove Back explore the many lifestyle issues facing educated, dynamic upper-class women as they seek happiness and self-definition through their work and their relationships.

For her portrayal of feisty, tough, black heroines, McMillan has been compared to acclaimed black women writers Alice Walker, Gloria Naylor, and Zora Neale Hurston. McMillan acknowledges the compliment, but asserted in the introduction to the 1990 short-story anthology Breaking Ice, which she edited, that her generation of black writers is "a new breed, free to write as we please … because of the way life has changed."

"McMillan has the power to be an important contemporary novelist," stated Valerie Sayers in the New York Times Book Review in 1989. By that time, McMillan had already garnered attention and critical praise for her first novel, Mama, which was published in 1987. Over the next five years predictions about the writer's future began to come true. In 1992 McMillan saw the publication of Waiting to Exhale, her third novel. Her publisher sent her on a twenty-city, six-week tour, and McMillan appeared on several popular television programs. As healthy sales of her novels, as well as the purchase of their film rights showed, the author's honest, unaffected writing style clearly struck a chord with the U.S. book-buying public.

McMillan grew up in Port Huron, Michigan, and discovered the pleasure of reading as a teenager while shelving books in a local library. As a student at a community college in Los Angeles, McMillan immersed herself in most of the classics of African-American literature, and at age twenty-five she published her first short story. Eleven years after that, her first novel, Mama, was released by Houghton Mifflin.

McMillan was determined not to let her debut novel go unnoticed. Typically, first novels receive little publicity other than the press releases and galleys sent out by the publisher. When McMillan's publisher told her that they could not do more for her, she decided to promote the book on her own. She wrote over 3,000 letters to chain bookstores, independent booksellers, universities, and colleges. By the end of the summer of 1987 she had received several requests to do readings. McMillan then scheduled her own book publicity tour and let her publicist know where she was going.

Mama had started out as a short story. "I really love the short story as a form," explained McMillan in an interview with Writer's Digest. "Mama" was just one of several short stories McMillan had tried unsuccessfully to get into print. Then the Harlem Writer's Guild accepted her into their group and advised her that "Mama" really should be a novel and not a short story. After four weeks at the MacDowell artists colony and two weeks at Yaddo, McMillan had expanded her short story into a book of more than 400 pages. When her agent suggested certain revisions, McMillan questioned whether the woman truly understood what the book was about.

Frustrated by this and by other events taking place in her personal life, McMillan took things into her own hands and sent a collection of short stories to Houghton Mifflin, hoping to at least get some free editorial advice. McMillan was surprised when the publisher contacted her, not about the short stories, but about the novel she had mentioned briefly in her cover letter to them. She sent them pages from Mama and approximately four days later got word from the publisher that they loved it.

Mama tells the story of the struggle Mildred Peacock has in raising her five children after she throws her drunkard husband out of the house. The novel begins: "Mildred hid the ax beneath the mattress of the cot in the dining room." With those words, McMillan's novel becomes "a runaway narrative pulling a crowded cast of funny, earthy characters," stated Sayers in the New York Times Book Review. Because of McMillan's promotional efforts, the novel received numerous reviews—the overwhelming majority of which were positive. Six weeks after Mama was published, it went into its third printing. Michael Awkward, reviewing the novel in Callaloo, deemed it a "moving, often hilarious and insightful exploration of a slice of black urban life that is rarely seen in contemporary black women's fiction."

Disappearing Acts, McMillan's second novel, tells the story of star-crossed lovers by alternating the narrative between the main characters. Zora Banks and Franklin Swift fall in love "at first sight" when they meet at Zora's new apartment, where Franklin works as part of the renovating crew. Zora is an educated black woman working as a junior high school music teacher; Franklin is a high-school dropout working in construction. In spite of the differences in their backgrounds, the two become involved, move in together, and try to overcome the fear they both feel because of past failures in love.

Writing in the Washington Post Book World, David Nicholson pointed out that although this difference in backgrounds is an old literary device, it is one that is particularly relevant to black Americans: "Professional black women complain of an ever-shrinking pool of eligible men, citing statistics that show the number of black men in prison is increasing, while the number of black men in college is decreasing. Articles on alternatives for women, from celibacy to 'man-sharing' to relationships with blue-collar workers like Franklin have long been a staple of black general interest and women's magazines." McMillan expressed her own thoughts on this issue in an article in Essence. "Maybe it's just me, but I'm finding it harder and harder to meet men. … I grew up and became what my mama prayed out loud I'd become: educated, strong, smart, independent and reliable…. Nowit seems as if carving a place for myself in the world is backfiring. Never in a million years would I have dreamed that I'd be thirty-eight years old and still single."

Reviewers have commended McMillan for her ability to give such a true voice to the character of Franklin in Disappearing Acts. A reviewer for the Washington Post Book World called the novel "one of the few … to contain rounded, sympathetic portraits of black men and to depict relationships between black men and black women as something more than the relationship between victimizer and victim, oppressor and oppressed." In the New York Times Book Review another reviewer stated: "The miracle is that Ms. McMillan takes the reader so deep into this man's head—and makes what goes on there so complicated—that [the] story becomes not only comprehensible but affecting." Not only did McMillan's second novel win critical acclaim, it also was optioned for a film by Home Box Office. Although it also sparked a defamation suit brought by McMillan's former lover, who claimed that McMillan used him as the model for the novel's main male character, the New York State Supreme Court ultimately ruled in McMillan's favor.

Waiting to Exhale tells the stories of four professional black women who have everything except the love of a good man. The overall theme of the book is men's fear of commitment; a sub-theme is the fear of growing old alone. The novel hit a nerve with its readers, both male and female, as many readers seemed to identify with McMillan's characters. According to a Los Angeles Times writer, one black male reader proclaimed: "I think I speak for a lot of brothers. I know I'm all over the book…. All I can say is, I'm will ing to learn. Being defensive is not the answer." That was precisely the response McMillan was hoping to get.

One issue that emerges from reviews of McMillan's books is her use of profanity, and Waiting to Exhale sparked the same criticism. One critic referred to the novel's protagonists as male-bashing stand-up comedians who use foul language. For McMillan, reproducing the profane language people actually use is her way of staying close to reality. As she told a Publishers Weekly interviewer: "That's the way we talk. And I want to know why I've never read a review where they complain about the language that male writers use!"

"Fans of McMillan's previous novels … will recognize McMillan's authentic, unpretentious voice in every page of How Stella Got Her Groove Back," noted Liesl Schillinger in the Washington Post Book World. The story of a forty-something businesswoman whose life has been spent raising her son and working her way to success, How Stella Got Her Groove Back finds the resourceful, spunky protagonist off to Jamaica to shake up more than just a boring existence. Stella is determined to fill that empty place in her life where a permanent love interest should be, and a twenty-yearold Jamaican named Winston more than fits the bill.

She brings Winston back to the United States with her and, almost unbelievably, he is accepted by her eleven-year-old son as well as by her sisters, and life continues happily ever after. Although noting that McMillan's novel "is not deeper or more searching than the average sitcom, no more dramatically powerful than a backyard barbecue," Richard Bernstein cited How Stella Got Her Groove Back as "an irreverent, mischievous, diverting novel that at times will make you laugh out loud," in his New York Times review. Maxine Chernoff dubbed the novel "not quite serious enough for summer reading" in her review in Chicago's Tribune Books. Schillinger praised McMillan for realizing that "women are ready to read about themselves not only as schemers or sufferers, but as the adventurous heroes of their own lives."

A Day Late and a Dollar Short, published in 2001, had its genesis in the early 1990s, but McMillan was sidetracked by the deaths of her mother and her best friend, then by her marriage to Jonathan Plummer. The novel employs six first-person voices to explore the dynamics of one family as the beloved matriarch lies dying in the hospital. "All six voices—male and female, young and old—are fresh and vital, propelling conflict and exposing the strengths and foibles of the good but imperfect people," declared Jewell Parker Rhodes in the Washington Post Book World. Rhodes further characterized the novel as a "glorious" work that, "like the best fiction, helped illuminate corners of my own heart. Like a call-and-response chant, [McMillan's] strong characterization and plotting dared me not to laugh, cry and shout upon recognizing this glittering, complicated portrayal of African-American family life."

McMillan does not shy away from portraying the most devastating aspects of modern life in A Day Late and a Dollar Short. She tackles infidelity, drug and alcohol abuse, sexual abuse, and sibling rivalry, while allowing her characters to defend—and condemn—themselves through their own commentary. "The story was important to me," the author told a Publishers Weekly interviewer. "My hope for my readers is that broken relationships among family members might be looked at again." A Publishers Weekly contributor called A Day Late and a Dollar Short "a moving and true depiction of an American family, driven apart and bound together by the real stuff of life." In a review for Book, Andrea King Collier lauded the work, noting that, "In the hands of McMillan, the master of edgy, ensemble storytelling," the novel "has drama and snap."

With her string of best-sellers, McMillan has proven to be a "crossover" artist who, while writing exclusively about black characters, transcends the bounds of ethnic issues. McMillan's voice belongs to what has been described as "the New Black Aesthetic": one that does not deal with everything from the perspective of race. For example, her novel The Interruption of Everything tells the story of Marilyn Grimes, a consummate wife and mother of three grown children who is married to an average Joe. This scenario could aptly describe many women of any race, creed, or nationality. Although her life appears to be a good one, Marilyn has postponed many of her own dreams so long that she can no longer quite remember what they are. Feeling closed in by irrelevant demands, Marilyn sets out to reinvent her life.

As McMillan explained to Writers Yearbook: "Everything I write is about empowerment, regardless of what kind it is. It's always about a woman standing up for herself and her rights and her beliefs, and not worrying about what other people think. But one of the things I think fiction should not do is be didactic. I'm not here to preach, I'm not trying to be Gloria Steinem in disguise. I would prefer that you be affected, that by reading something you get a sense of empowerment, and hopefully if it's subtle enough you won't even know it happened."

Commenting on her motivation for writing, McMillan explained to a Writer contributor that she has a good reason to keep working. "I write because the world is an imperfect place, and we behave in an imperfect manner. I want to understand why it's so hard to be good, honest, loving, caring, thoughtful and generous. Writing is about the only way (besides praying) that allows me to be compassionate toward folks who, in real life, I'm probably not that sympathetic toward. I want to understand myself and others better, so what better way than to pretend to be them."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

books

Authors and Artists for Young Adults, Volume 21, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1998.

Contemporary Black Biography, Volume 17, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1998.

Contemporary Literary Criticism, Gale (Detroit, MI), Volume 50, 1988, Volume 61, 1991.

Patrick, Diane, Terry McMillan: The Unauthorized Biography, St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 1999.

periodicals

Black Issues Book Review, January, 2001, Gwendolyn E. Osborne, review of A Day Late and a Dollar Short, p. 15.

Book, January, 2001, Andrea King Collier, review of A Day Late and a Dollar Short, p. 71.

Booklist, November 15, 2000, Vanessa Bush, review of A Day Late and a Dollar Short, p. 588.

Callaloo, summer, 1988.

Christian Science Monitor, January 11, 2001, "Waiting to Exhale in the Thin Atmosphere of Troubled Siblings," p. 18.

Cosmopolitan, August, 1989.

Detroit News, September 7, 1992.

Emerge, September, 1992; June, 1996.

English Journal, April, 1996, p. 86.

Esquire, July, 1988.

Essence, February, 1990; October, 1992; May, 1995, p. 52; June, 1996, pp. 50, 54.

Library Journal, January 1, 2001, Emily Jones, review of A Day Late and a Dollar Short, p. 155.

Los Angeles Times, February 23, 1987; October 29, 1990; June 19, 1992.

Mademoiselle, July, 1996, p. 77.

Newsweek, January 8, 1996, p. 68; April 29, 1996, pp. 76, 79.

New Yorker, April 29, 1996, p. 102.

New York Review of Books, November 4, 1993, p. 33.

New York Times, May 15, 1996, p. B5, C17.

New York Times Book Review, February 22, 1987; August 6, 1989; May 31, 1992; June 2, 1996, p. 21; February 4, 2001, Ruth Coughlin, review of A Day Late and a Dollar Short, p. 21.

New York Times Magazine, August 9, 1992.

People, July 20, 1992.

Publishers Weekly, May 11, 1992; July 13, 1992; September 21, 1992; May 6, 1996, p. 30; December 11, 2000, Diane Patrick, "Terry McMillan Is Back," p. 42; December 11, 2000, review of A Day Late and a Dollar Short, p. 65.

Time, January 8, 1996, p. 72; May 6, 1996, p. 77.

Tribune Books (Chicago, IL), September 23, 1990; May 31, 1992; May 5, 1996, p. 6.

Village Voice, March 24, 1987.

Wall Street Journal, April 11, 1991.

Washington Post, November 17, 1990; January 25, 2001, Linton Weeks, "Terry McMillan, Encompassing the Family Circle," p. C1.

Washington Post Book World, August 27, 1989; September 16, 1990; May 24, 1992; May 5, 1996, p. 1; February 11, 2001, Jewell Parker Rhodes, "The Price Club," p. 5.

Writer, August, 2001, interview with McMillan, p. 66.

Writer's Digest, October, 1987.