Terry McMillan | Signed First Editions

About Terry McMillan

Terry McMillan was born on 18 October 1951 in Port Huron, Michigan, the eldest of five children. Her parents divorced when she was thirteen, and her father died three years later. Her mother supported the family working nights at a factory, and books were not plentiful in the house. McMillan found her way to them anyway, through a job at the local library at fourteen, where she encountered James Baldwin and, in her own account, began to understand what literature might actually be for. That understanding would eventually change American publishing.

After high school she moved to Los Angeles, enrolled at LA City College, and took her first writing class. A friend asked to publish a poem of hers in a small Black literary magazine, and something shifted. She transferred to the University of California, Berkeley on a scholarship, earned a degree in journalism in 1977, and later attended the MFA film programme at Columbia University before leaving, citing experiences of racism. She was not done with writing, only with that particular path to it.

Her first novel, Mama, was published in 1987, a fictional reworking of her own Michigan childhood centred on a fierce, determined mother raising five children alone. When her publisher declined to invest in a proper book tour, McMillan took matters into her own hands, writing to thousands of booksellers, particularly Black-owned bookstores and historically Black colleges and universities across the country. The book went into its third printing within six weeks. She had, essentially, invented the model that others would later follow.

What came next was more than a personal success. Waiting to Exhale, published in 1992, followed four middle-class Black women in Phoenix, each navigating relationships, ambition, and disappointment with humour, candour, and considerable style. It was the second largest paperback deal in publishing history at the time, spent months on the New York Times bestseller list, and sold millions of copies. The 1995 film, directed by Forest Whitaker and starring Whitney Houston, Angela Bassett, Loretta Devine, and Lela Rochon, was hailed as the first Black romantic drama for cinema and became a cultural watershed. It introduced the phrase “girlfriend fiction” as a subgenre, and opened the publishing industry’s eyes to an enormous audience of Black women readers it had been ignoring.
How Stella Got Her Groove Back followed in 1996, a roman à clef drawing on McMillan’s own experience of falling in love with a much younger Jamaican man while on holiday. The film adaptation in 1998, starring Angela Bassett, Whoopi Goldberg, and Taye Diggs, was another box-office success. The publishing deal McMillan secured on the strength of Waiting to Exhale was reportedly worth six million dollars. She has since published over twelve novels, with her most recent, It Was the Way She Said It, a career-spanning collection, appearing in 2025. She remains active as a writer and continues to work with Lifetime on a series of television productions under the banner Terry McMillan Presents.

She received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1988, the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work, and has been a regular presence on bestseller lists across four decades. Her influence on what is sometimes called the “Terry McMillan Effect,” the belated recognition by the publishing industry that Black women were a significant, largely underserved readership, is as significant as anything she has written.