Terry McMillan (1951- ) is an American writer. She is best known for her books “Waiting to Exhale” (1992) and “How Stella Got Her Groove Back” (1996). Both were made into successful Hollywood films. She is perhaps the richest black writer in the world.
With her first book, “Mama” (1987), she proved to the book industry that black people read books too. That led to a huge growth in black fiction.
Her writing is honest. She does not dress things up to make them seem nicer or more important than they are. Her writing style matches this: it is close to how people talk.
She grew up in Port Huron near Detroit, the oldest of five. Her father became a violent drunk and her parents broke up when she was 13. At 16 she worked at the library and discovered James Baldwin: she had no idea that black people wrote books.
She got her degree at Berkeley and then moved to New York. There she studied film and joined a writer’s workshop in Harlem. She wrote a story based on her mother. They told her she should make it into a book. She did. It became “Mama”.
As a single mother, she got up early in the morning to write and she wrote during lunch at work. On the train to work in the morning and again at night coming home she read over what she had written and made it better.
Houghton Mifflin loved her book and printed it. But they gave her no money for a book tour: they thought black people do not read books! So she went from town to town and read her book at any black university or bookshop that would have her.
She developed a following so that when her second book, “Disappearing Acts” (1989), came out two years later it sold two million copies. “Waiting to Exhale” came out three years after that and sold four million copies. It was made into a film. Having studied film at school, she writes her books with that in mind.
She was now rich and famous. But not happy. Then her mother died. Then her best friend.
She went to Jamaica for a change of scene. She fell in love with a man there half her age, Jonathan Plummer.
When she got back she wrote about it in a rush of words for 30 days. It had few periods, but she left it that way: it was true to how she felt. That became “How Stella Got Her Groove Back”.
She and Plummer married and lived in her beautiful house in northern California. She wrote other books. Then in 2004 she found out that Plummer had been having an affair – not with another woman, but with a man!
The divorce was very bitter, very raw and very public. A part of the battle made it onto Oprah and the Internet.
Her latest book is “The Interruption of Everything” (2005).
I met her in 1992 at a book fair in New York. She is very charming in person.
See also:
- New York
- Hollywood
- California
- film
- Stephen King on becoming a good writer
- June Jordan – a very different sort of black American female writer from the 1990s.
- Danyel Smith – a reader turned writer who also has had trouble with periods.
I think I have read just about all of her books and short stories in anthologies. Her new book “Who Asked You” is coming out. I will be reading it.
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I enjoyed “Who Asked You” I finished reading that last month.
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I have read many of her books. Great entertainment, and years later, can even remember exact lines from the books. That just doesn’t happen.
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