By now, you’d expect novelist Terry McMillan to be comfortable with her celebrity.
After all, a year has passed since her third novel, “Waiting to Exhale,” soared to the New York Times’ best-seller list during its first week in print, since crowds jammed bookstores to meet the author whom The New Yorker described as a combination of “Ntozake Shange, Jane Austen and Danielle Steel,” since she sat down with Oprah and Arsenio, since the paperback rights to “Waiting to Exhale” sold for an extraordinary $2.64 million, since strangers began mobbing her on the street.
But McMillan seemed startled recently when two women rushed toward her on Michigan Avenue in Chicago.
“You’re Terry McMillan,” said one. “I love your work. Keep writing.”
“Sister, you’re good,” said the other.
There was an awkward pause.
The women flashed high-beam smiles, as if to invite a dialogue.
McMillan said, “Thank you very much,” and then moved on, squelching any conversation about the sassy characters who piloted her rocket to fame and wealth.
“It’s weird,” McMillan says of her new status, before appearing at a Chicago bookstore to sign paperback editions of “Waiting to Exhale” (Pocket, $5.99). The novel is about four African-American women friends whose lives are a mix of career triumphs and romantic traumas.
“I’m just starting to get used to hearing my name called when I’m in some strange place.”
She loves her fans, but loathes the limelight.
“It’s nice to know that people in the community are responding positively to something I’ve written,” says McMillan, editor of “Breaking Ice: An Anthology of Contemporary African-American Fiction” (Penguin, $13) and author of “Mama” (Washington Square Press, $10) and “Disappearing Acts” (Washington Square Press, $12), earlier novels that explore modern urban relationships.
“But also, it’s been a little overwhelming. I started getting scared. In each city, I was frightened at the size of the audience. I couldn’t believe all of these people were coming to hear me read from this book and get theirs signed. It’s the highest form of flattery. It sort of let me know I did something right.”
From a commercial standpoint, “Waiting to Exhale” is “right” because it speaks directly to women in their 30s who are professional, single and hungry for a man to take their breath away, as the title suggests.
Waving a copy of “Waiting to Exhale” on her show last summer, Oprah Winfrey gushed, “It’s like a conversation with your girlfriends, but you don’t have to pay the long-distance phone bills.”
Laments Savannah, the character who is a producer at a Phoenix television station: “As a matter of fact, most of the men I’ve met over the last few years have been boring, selfish, manipulative, or weak. Worse than babies. Got an excuse for everything. Some were just plain lost.”
Savannah’s sisters in soul-searching are Bernadine, a mother of two whose husband just dumped her for a younger white woman; Robin, a flighty insurance agent who can’t distinguish between “the Real Thing and the Pretenders” when it comes to men; and Gloria, an overweight single mother and hair salon owner.
Some critics have complained about McMillan’s simplistic characters and dialogue-propelled plots, but a San Francisco Chronicle reviewer hailed her as “perhaps the world’s finest chronicler of modern life among African-American men and women.”
McMillan, 41, grew up in Port Huron, Mich., one of five children born into a blue collar family. Her parents divorced when she was 13.
The Bible was the only book in their house. But during high school McMillan became a voracious reader while shelving books for $1.25 an hour at the local library. There she found the work of James Baldwin and went on to study African-American literature in college.
At the University of California at Berkeley, McMillan majored in journalism and wrote short stories. Her first one, “The End,” caught the attention of novelist Ishmael Reed, and he published it in 1976 through the Before Columbus Foundation, which supports novice ethnic writers.
After graduation, McMillan moved to New York City and entered the film program at Columbia University. She grew dissatisfied with the program, dropped out, found work as a word processor and wrote fiction on the side. During the early 1980s, McMillan began using drugs and drinking, but soon decided to stop the behaviors to avert a dependency, a topic she widely discussed earlier in her career.
Encouraged by fellow members of the Harlem Writers Guild, McMillan turned one of her short stories into a novel called “Mama,” the tale of Mildred Peacock, a factory worker and mother of five who loses jobs as often as she loses men.
“I wrote `Mama’ to understand how far a mom is willing to go for her children,” says McMillan, who completed the first draft in 1983, a year before she gave birth to her only child, Solomon Welch.
Not wanting to let “Mama” languish in obscurity-the typical fate of most literary debuts-McMillan orchestrated her own promotional campaign, cranking out 3,000 letters to bookstores and colleges. Those efforts resulted in invitations to give readings, and McMillan started making a name for herself when the book sold out of its first printing before its publication date in 1987.
By that time, McMillan had broken up with boyfriend Leonard Welch, Solomon’s father, and left New York to teach creative writing at the University of Wyoming.
In 1989 McMillan published “Disappearing Acts,” which depicts the volatile relationship between Zora Banks, an aspiring songwriter, and Franklin Swift, an uneducated construction worker.
“I wrote it because I needed to understand when it’s time to realize that you are not the only one who can do all the changing in a relationship and when it’s time to leave,” McMillan says.
The novel provoked a libel suit from Welch, who was also a construction worker and who claimed that he was recognizable as the main character, but last year, the case was decided in McMillan’s favor.
“Disappearing Acts” also sold several hundred thousand copies and prompted MGM to commission McMillan to write the screenplay, which has not been produced yet.
McMillan, who never has been married, spent three years writing “Waiting to Exhale,” now being adapted for the movies.
It was inspired by her own life, she says. In the late 1980s, McMillan-then an associate professor of English at the University of Arizona in Tucson-published an essay that addressed her quest for a satisfying relationship.
“From the time I got to Tucson I’ve been trying to have a good time, but the most reliable form of entertainment seems to be taking my 5-year-old son to the zoo,” she wrote in WigWag in 1989.
In “Waiting to Exhale,” McMillan says her mission was “to ask if women expect too much from men, and how you can come to terms with learning to do without them. I also needed to understand how valuable friendship is.”
Despite the autobiographical slant of her books, McMillan steadfastly defends them as works of fiction.
“I just try to hear how people talk, and I get to know my characters,” says McMillan, acknowledging that she is most like Savannah because of her independence and decisiveness. “I don’t necessarily have to love them, but I always do in my own way.”
During last year’s promotional tour, McMillan hit 20 cities in six weeks and blames that feverish pace for her current boredom with the book’s unflappable foursome.
“I wish they’d go away,” she says flatly. “I want to think about some new people. It’s been pretty hard for me to get into my next book, because these characters are still living in my house. I’ve had a tough time trying to get rid of them so I can focus on what I’d like to think is the new family I’m trying to get to know.”
McMillan, who once openly talked about her past and the status of her romances, is now very guarded about her personal life.
She does not furnish details, diplomatically cutting off any discussion with this explanation: “There are things about my private life that I don’t want the world to know, like relationships. I share what I want to share when I put it on the page. My life now feels a lot more public than I care for it to be.”
Now that she’s a household name, strangers approach McMillan for money, relatives want her to make appearances at their children’s elementary schools and charities solicit her for contributions in the range of $20,000.
“If I said `Yes’ to everything I was asked to do, I could forget about writing another book,” she says. “For a while, I did say `OK,’ and I’d sell tickets or show up at something, but I got burned out. I cannot save the world, which for a while, I think I was trying to do. I can’t represent every organization, even though I believe in what they’re doing. I still have a life.”
That it’s in the public eye has been an adjustment for McMillan.
“I thought I could go home after the (hardcover) book tour and my life would be quiet,” says McMillan, who lives in Danville, a posh suburb near Oakland where she is raising Solomon, now 9. “I was naive. All I ever wanted was to have a nice audience and have people like my books. I never anticipated all this stuff happening.”
For “Waiting to Exhale,” though, she says she expected the criticism she has received from some who object to her portraying middle-age black men as philanderers, liars and thieves. McMillan takes it in stride, using such feedback as a teaching tool for Solomon.
“I want him to know there are drawbacks to sticking your neck out,” McMillan says. “Not everybody is going to like everything you do, so don’t feel insecure.”
She says she doesn’t take her financial security for granted either.
“Solomon started saying, `You know, Mom, people at my school say you’re famous and we’re rich,’ ” McMillan says. “Every once in a while, I’ll lie and say, `We don’t have any money.’ Or if he asks for things, I’ll say, `We can’t afford it.’ I came from a school where you had to work for what you wanted. So he can do his chores and save his allowance. When he wants another Nintendo game, he can buy it. I suppose by normal standards, I could be considered rich, but I don’t carry myself that way. I don’t spend it that way. I don’t take it for granted.”
Soon, McMillan’s schedule will have the “clearing” and “peace and quiet” she craves not only for writing her next book, but also for immersing herself in contemporary fiction.
“I’ve started to read again, but not the way I used to,” she says, standing to leave for her next appointment. “I want to be able to sit down with a good book and at least get through 40 pages without hearing the phone or the fax.”
