Consider Marilyn Grimes, a wildly hormonal mother of three in a stale marriage, hiding in a toilet stall and weighing her options. Watch Barbara Bentley ponder having a fling because her Pratesi sheets and Jimmy Choo shoes can’t compensate for a cheating husband. And check out preppie Aisha Branch McCovney, lolling in bed for three days with her dream man, although she’s engaged to the scion of an old-money family.
These characters are from the new novels by Terry McMillan (“The Interruption of Everything”), Connie Briscoe (“Can’t Get Enough”) and Benilde Little (“Who Does She Think She Is?”). Often considered the midwives of black chick lit, these writers are all Baby Boomers who paved the way more than a decade ago for popular fiction about black characters.
Now the writers (and many of those characters) have grown up, but they are still pioneers.
What they are churning out now, after all, is not exactly chick lit, which is resolutely young, single and urban. Nor are they replicating the more familiar tales of middle-age, middle-class American women. Those women–in fiction, film and television–usually come in one shade; on ABC’s “Desperate Housewives,” for example, Wisteria Lane only recently welcomed its first black residents.
“Black women in the 40-plus range are virtually invisible in media,” said the author Marita Golden, founder of the Hurston/Wright Foundation, which supports black writers.
That is what sets this generation of more seasoned black women writers apart.
“What we’re seeing with these writers,” said Patrik Henry Bass, books editor at Essence magazine, “is the maturation of the buppie.”
Readers along for the ride
Readers who loved McMillan’s “Waiting to Exhale” (1992), about four upwardly mobile young women yearning for the right man, or Briscoe’s “Sisters and Lovers” (1994), the tale of three sisters struggling with careers and families, are now intrigued by the triumphs and struggles of women like themselves, Bass said.
“We’re really the only place you’re going to see black women of a certain age and a certain sort of history,” said Little, whose “Who Does She Think She Is?” (Free Press), her fourth book, tells the story of Aisha, 26; her divorced mother, Camille, 45; and her patrician grandmother, Geneva, 72. Aisha’s engagement to a rich white man is a chance for the other two women to consider their lives and choices.
Telling the story in three voices, said Little, who is 46 and a mother of two, allowed her to explore the generation gaps between the characters and to look at the different options available to black women as attitudes toward race and women’s rights changed.
She has used her novels (the others are “Good Hair,” “The Itch” and “Acting Out”) to explore issues such as class divisions among blacks, buppie ennui and the juggling acts of even privileged wives and mothers. These issues are a far cry from slavery or the ghetto, which she was told in 1989 was what she had to write about to be published.
McMillan’s blockbuster “Waiting to Exhale” is widely considered the wakeup call to publishers that readers craved stories about the lives of black women.
During the ’90s, Bass said, black women writers such as Pearl Cleage, Bebe Moore Campbell, Diane McKinney-Whetstone and Tina McElroy Ansa–all of them with new or soon-to-be released books–benefited from McMillan’s high profile. Their characters, too, reflect more mature lives affected by issues such as remarriage and children, career struggles and troubled family members.
McMillan has sold 10 million books, and it is a measure of her success that 500,000 first copies of “The Interruption of Everything” (Viking), her sixth novel, released this month, have been printed. In “Interruption,” a suburban Californian, Marilyn Grimes, deals with life right before menopause, an annoying live-in mother-in-law, grown kids with their own problems, a husband in full midlife crisis, a mom who is becoming forgetful and a sister with a drug problem. Sigh.
McMillan, 53, said “Interruption” reflected some of the changes in her own life, which has included marriage and the quotidian trials of single motherhood. McMillan recently filed for divorce from her Jamaican-born husband of six years, Jonathan Plummer, who now says he’s gay. But, she said, a similar, complexly drawn black character was hard to find on television or in the movies.
“Despite the fact that everybody seemed to think I was this jet-setter,” she said in an interview, “I took my son to school, I carpooled, I went to every little league soccer game, every play, everything. But the one thing that I noticed was how many women were the ones who sat there week after week, every practice, every game.
“And over the years I realized how much responsibility we have as women and as mothers and as wives.”
So, she said, she wrote a book that asked, What’s next “when you realize that you’ve done all you can but it’s mostly for everybody else?”
She might have helped chick lit to be born, but McMillan says she does not believe that its man-chasing focus reflects where she is in life. She even passionately hates the term “chick lit,” calling it a cheap shot, “because most women writers write about the heart and matters of the heart, and that can encompass a lot of things.”
One solution, she said, is for publishers and critics to stop obsessively pigeonholing writers and to let readers enjoy their stories.
“Most every concern and issue and problem that every human being has, for the most part, is universal, particularly in this day and age,” she said.
Briscoe, though, says we live in a culture so smitten with youth that one of her fans at a recent reading was shocked to learn that Barbara Bentley, wife of the philandering millionaire in “Can’t Get Enough” (Doubleday), was 50. “I was like, yeah, she’s 50,” said Briscoe, who is 52. “We have lives, too.”
But then, she said, she was approached at the reading by a young woman in her 20s or 30s who said she was tired of novels about singles and sex.
Mature women showcased
Briscoe’s first two books, “Sisters and Lovers” and “Big Girls Don’t Cry,” were mostly about women in their 20s and 30s seeking men, taking care of children, climbing the corporate ladder and even steeping themselves in 1970s-style campus politics.
It was all fresh material back then. Her latest novel, a sequel to “P.G. County” (2002), is her way of poking at the material obsessions of some members of the African-American upper crust, as well as showcasing mature women with sex lives. For good measure, she throws in some teenagers and a good-hearted working woman, too.
She looks forward, she said, to having more non-black readers discover the worlds created by black writers, especially given the current noise about desperate housewives and mommy wars.
“We’re not writing about issues of racism all the time or exclusively about racism or poverty,” she said. “We’re writing about general issues that affect women of all ages.”
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ctc-woman@tribune.com
