“Everything I write is about empowerment,” says Terry McMillan ’77. Known for her zesty works depicting independent black women, McMillan won the Lifetime Achievement Award at the first-annual 2008 Essence Literary Awards this past February in New York City.
“No single writer today has documented the African American experience from a contemporary black woman’s point of view like Terry McMillan,” says Patrik Henry Bass, a senior editor for books and art at Essence, the preeminent lifestyle publication for African American women.
McMillan has long had ties to Essence. As an undergraduate at Cal, she won an essay contest for a piece on black male-female relationships. But this latest award surprised her.
“I thought, ‘Lifetime [Achievement]? Hey, I’m just getting started!’ I’ve only written six novels,” she says, “but the magazine wanted to express its thanks and respect for what I’ve accomplished so far.”
From facts to fiction
Born and raised near Detroit, Michigan, McMillan wanted to leave small-town life, and she landed at a community college in Los Angeles. Keeping “her eyes on the prize,” she transferred to Berkeley. Initially she wanted to major in sociology.
“We didn’t have a lot growing up,” she says. “But I knew many others suffered more than we did. I thought our lives, as human beings, should be of service.”
At the same time, however, McMillan was writing scathing editorials for two student newspapers, The Daily Californian and Black Thoughts. When the time came to declare a major, her adviser, who had read her work, questioned her interest in sociology.
“When I told him writing was only a hobby and that it’s easy, he said, ‘That’s your ticket in life.’ I still credit him today for steering me right.”
McMillan settled on journalism, but favored “making things up.” She took a fictional writing workshop with Ishmael Reed, a lecturer in the English department at that time whose poems, novels, and other works have profoundly impacted African American writing.
“That’s where I found it — my voice,” she says. “I learned I could lie and tell the truth at the same time.”
Leaving oppression behind
McMillan’s best-known books — Waiting to Exhale (1992) and How Stella Got Her Groove Back (1996) — have sold millions of copies each, and both were made into movies. Her forthcoming novel, Getting to Happy, will reunite readers with the four women, now 15 years older, from Exhale.
Beyond that, however, McMillan’s hot-button issue is “ghetto lit,” a new genre of fiction that is raking in sales across the nation. According to McMillan, not only is it poorly written and littered with gratuitous sex and violence, glorifying what black authors and activists have been working to debunk for decades, but many fine, promising writers are getting squeezed out of the literary world. She has taken her concerns to the media.
“It takes years to learn how to look at the destruction of beautiful things, to learn how to leave the place of oppression; and how to make your own regeneration … out of nothing,” her Web site states.
As long as McMillan continues to write, we can expect more beautiful things.
