Terry McMillan - 1951
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San Pedro High School in San Pedro, California
I. Biography
Terry McMillan was born on October 18, 1951 in Port Huron Michigan. McMillan grew up in Port Huron, Michigan. Her working class parents did not make a point of reading to their five children, but McMillan discovered the pleasure of reading as a teenager shelving books at the local library. Prior to working in the library, she had no knowledge that African American authors existed. McMillan recalled feeling embarrassed when she saw book by James Baldwin with his picture on the cover. In an article in the Washington Post , she is quoted as saying, "I did not read his book because I was too afraid. I couldn't imagine that he'd have anything better or different to say than Thomas Mann, Henry Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson. . . . Needless to say, I was not just naïve, but had not yet acquired an ounce of black pride."
After high school, McMillan continued her education at a community college in Los Angeles. There, she immersed herself in most of the classics of African American literature. Terry McMillan received her BA in Journalism from the University of California at Berkeley, and attended the MFA Film Program at Columbia University.
II. Literary Works
After reading Alex Haley's Autobiography of Malcom X, McMillan realized that she had no reason to be ashamed of a people who had such a proud history. At the age of 25 in 1976, she published her first short story. Eleven years later, while she worked as a word processor and reared her infant son alone, Houghton Mifflin published her first novel, Mama.
McMillan has come along way since her first publication. McMillan loved short stories and considered Mama also as another short story. When her agent kept suggesting constant revisions, McMillan questioned whether she was understanding the gist of the story or not. Frustrated by this and certain events taking place in her personal life, McMillan took the liberty of sending her short stories to Houghton Mifflin. Hoping to receive at least some editorial advice, McMillan was surprised when the publisher contacted her about the novel she had mentioned briefly in her letter to them. She of course sent it and four days later she received word that they loved it.
Typically, an author's first novel would not receive a lot of publicity but McMillan was determined to change this by taking matters into her own hands. She personally wrote over three thousand letters to chain bookstores, independent booksellers, universities, and colleges. The recipients of these letters had never been approached like this before, so they really didn't know how they could resist.
By the end of the summer of 1987, she had several offers for readings. She then scheduled her own book publicity tour and let her publicist know what direction in which she was going. Throughout her life, McMillan was an independent woman making her own decisions and this was just another example of her strong willed personality. Most all of her novels are based on characters that are strong, independent, and feminine African American women.
III. Interview with Terry McMillan
In 1995 Veronica Chambers, a well-known New York Times writer, interviewed Terry McMillan on what she thinks about her novel, Waiting to Exhale, hitting the big screen. The interview went as follows:
Chambers: Was Waiting to Exhale your first novel to be bought by Hollywood?
McMillan: Disappearing Acts was the first one and that was bought by Tri-Star.
Chambers: How was the experience of working on Waiting to Exhale, the movie?
McMillan: It was a good experience. I'd seen a lot of books being optioned and I knew it could take awhile for a book to make it onto the screen.
Chambers: After Disappearing Acts, were you a little gun-shy about selling the rights to Waiting to Exhale?
McMillan: Well, my first thought was, "I don't care." My second thought was I didn't think it would make a really good movie. I just couldn't picture it. But I'm glad I did make it into the movie, largely because it's a love story. We don't have many love stories on the big screen.
Chambers: Did you talk to other writers who had their books optioned for film?
McMillan: I really liked the Joy Luck Club movie. I talked to the author Amy Tan and she shared the process with me. That's how and why I got Ron Bass to co-write the script with me. I couldn't have done it myself without going through a lot of changes. Amy enjoyed the experiences of co-writing the script for her book. I think Ron made it that way.
Chambers: How did the co-writing process work in your case?
McMillan: I'd sit down and do the writing. Then Ron would come in and help me figure out what scenes to leave and what works and what doesn't [work]. He's a good technician. When you've written the novel, it's hard to distance yourself from the work. Ron helped me connect the dots. That's why it didn't matter that he wasn't black.
Chambers: What other movies adapted from books have you enjoyed?
McMillan: Accidental Tourist , based on the Anne Tyler novel. That was good.
Chambers: There's a lot of talk today that many writers write books with movies in mind: that the books by authors like John Grisham aren't as literary because they get so much money for the movie rights in advance of publication of the novel. Do you think that's usually true?
McMillan: The thing people don't understand is that somebody like John Grisham or Stephen King is very unusual. Good writing reads in a way that John Gardner calls a "continuous dream." For me, a good story is a moving image. But I'm in a different position, and I can't write a book anticipating whether or not it would be a good movie. I'm working on something now, which I can't talk about, that I happened to mention to someone. And they said, "Terry, what a great movie that would make." I said, "Will you f—— stop?" Hollywood is so hungry for material. But if I wrote a book that was unfilmable—all words, no visuals, no dialogue—nobody would buy it. They just don't want anyone else to buy it first. It really doesn't matter to them when they actually get around to making a movie of it. The point is that when I'm engaged in a story, Hollywood is the last thing on my mind.
Chambers: You once attended film school. Is it ever overwhelming that your work is now considered hot property in Hollywood?
McMillan: I don't take this quite as seriously as others do—Hollywood and its power. I take film and the art of film seriously, but Hollywood, no.
Chambers: Have you ever worried that you wouldn't like what they did with your book?
McMillan: Of course, I used to be like most people and expect that the first scene in the movie should be the best scene in the book. It's not like that. I wrote the story the way that I wanted it and that's the way it is in this book. Having seen the movie, I'm personally satisfied with the fact that this is an accurate rendition of the story.
Chambers: How were seeing Angela Bassett and Whitney Houston play the characters that you created?
McMillan: I was really able to separate the movie characters from those in the novel. It helped that it has been awhile since I wrote the book. I felt like I had the inside scoop on these women. But I didn't feel like I owned them or they were my possessions. They sort of feel like offspring. They have the same genes, but they don't have the same depth as characters as they do in the book. I mean that in a positive way.
Chambers: Do you lose a lot in the transition from the book to movie? Is that something that's always to be expected?
McMillan: Yes. It really is a movie based on the novel. It's not a novel. There's too much in a novel to fit into a two-hour movie. I'll never forget when I went to see The Client. I was in Palmdale, California, in the middle of nowhere. I overheard a conversation between two women in the audience. This woman says, "You should read the book," and the other woman said, "I think I will." To me, that was symbolic. The movie doesn't take away from the book. People will still go out and buy the book.
IV. Awards and Honors
Throughout her career as a writer, Terry McMillan has received numerous awards and honors. These include, National Book Award by the Before Columbus Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in literature, New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, and Doubleday/Columbia University Literary Fellowship, just to name a few. Today she is living with her family in the San Francisco Bay Area. McMillan also gives speeches and lectures for the English Department of Universities such as Stanford and her alma mater, University of California at Berkley.
V. Literary Works
first piece of work, short story (1976)Mama (1987)
Disappearing Acts(1989)
Waiting to Exhale (1992)
How Stella Got Her Groove Back (1996)
Day Late & a Dollar Short (1998)
VI. Contacts
Home: Danville, CA and Tucson, AZ
Office: Department of English, University of Arizona: Tucson, AZ 85721 or c/o Viking Penguin, 375 Hudson St., New York, NY 10014-3657
Agent: Molly Friedrich, Aaron M. Priest Literary Agency, Inc.
122 East 42nd St., Suite 3902, New York, NY
VII. McMillan on the Web
http://www.bookwire.com/qbr/features/95-nov/mcmillan.htmlhttp://www.feminist.org/research/authors/mcmillan.html
http://ucl.broward.cc.fl.us/writers/mcmillan.htm
http://www.fromscript2screen.com/vault/howstellagothergroove_1998.html
http://valencia.cc.fl.us/lrcwest/mcmillan.html
VIII. Works Cited
Internet sites listed above (in Links section)
This essay was submitted by a student of Kathy Honda Stein, a teacher at San Pedro High School in California.
Chambers, Veronica. Terry McMillan Goes to Hollywood. New York Times, 1995
McMillan, Terry. How Stella Got Her Groove Back, Signet, 1998
McMillan, Terry
. Waiting to Exhale, Pocket Books, 1992
McMillan, Terry. Mama, Houghton Mifflin, 1987
McMillan, Terry. Disappearing Act, 1989, reprint, 1995