Terry McMillan
Terry McMillan, the Port Huron-born novelist behind Waiting to Exhale and How Stella Got Her Groove Back, on her books and film deals as she turns 75.
Photo: annulla from Brooklyn, United States, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Resized and converted to WebP.
Port Huron, the Oldest of Five
Terry McMillan was born on October 18, 1951, in Port Huron, Michigan, a date given by both Encyclopedia.com and EBSCO's Research Starters biography. She turns 75 this month. She was the oldest of five children of Madeline Washington Tillman and Edward McMillan, a working-class couple. Her parents divorced when she was 13, and her father died about three years later. As the oldest, she helped raise her brother and three sisters.
She finished Port Huron High School in 1969, according to EBSCO, and spent two years at Los Angeles Community College before transferring to the University of California, Berkeley. She took a bachelor's degree in journalism there. No source we could open gives the year of the degree. She then went to Columbia University in New York for its film program. Michigan Women Forward lists it as the "MFA Film Program at Columbia" but does not say she completed it.
Three Thousand Letters for Mama
Her first novel, Mama, came out in 1987. Her publisher did little to promote it, so McMillan did it herself. Encyclopedia.com records that she wrote "over 3,000 letters" to bookstores, universities and colleges, which brought invitations to read and a tour she booked on her own. The book won the Doubleday New Voices in Fiction award and an American Book Award, according to the California Museum.
She taught while she wrote. Encyclopedia.com places her as an instructor at the University of Wyoming from 1987 to 1990 and as a professor at the University of Arizona from 1990 to 1992. Sources disagree on the date of her second novel, Disappearing Acts: EBSCO and the California Museum give 1989, while the Michigan Women Forward page prints 1993. HBO made it into a film in 2000.
Viking, Pocket Books and Waiting to Exhale
Viking published Waiting to Exhale in hardcover in 1992. On Fresh Air that June, McMillan told Terry Gross the book was about four strong, urban Black women in their thirties and their relationships. The book was slow to reach the top. Publishers Weekly reported in 2001 that it spent 43 weeks on the PW chart and did not reach number one until its 16th week. A University of Virginia bestseller study puts its New York Times run at 38 weeks, but gives no source for the number.
The paperback sale came early. The same University of Virginia page, citing a 1992 account by Max, says Pocket Books bought the rights by the novel's sixth week. Both that page and Encyclopedia.com give the price as $2.64 million and describe it as the second largest paperback deal in publishing history at the time. The Virginia page also prints a figure of $700,000 elsewhere in its text, and does not explain the gap.
By January 2001, Publishers Weekly counted 760,500 hardcover copies in print and two million in paperback. Salon put total sales at nearly 4 million copies in 1996. In 1995, 20th Century Fox released the film, directed by Forest Whitaker, with Whitney Houston and Angela Bassett in the cast.
A Resort in Negril and How Stella Got Her Groove Back
McMillan met Jonathan Plummer at a resort in Negril, Jamaica, Salon reported. Her next novel, How Stella Got Her Groove Back, came out in 1996, and she told Fresh Air it was "as close to autobiography as I've written in a long time."
The first hardcover printing was 800,000 copies. Publishers Weekly reported that the book went to number one in its first week and stayed on the chart for 21 weeks, and that by 2001 it had 1.1 million hardcover and 2.1 million paperback copies in print. Salon wrote that 20th Century Fox bought the film rights for an "undisclosed seven-figure sum." The film came out in 1998, and McMillan shared the screenplay credit with Ron Bass, according to EBSCO.
Encyclopedia.com and EBSCO both date her marriage to Plummer to 1998. In June 2005 the Associated Press reported that McMillan had filed in January of that year to end what it called a six-and-a-half-year marriage and was seeking an annulment. Plummer asked the court to set aside their prenuptial agreement and disputed her account.
A House in Danville
McMillan has one son, born in 1984. She moved to Danville, California, in 1990, when he was 6. "I moved here for my son," she told the Danville San Ramon weekly in a 2006 interview. In the same conversation she described writing for about four hours every morning: "Writing is like brushing my teeth and exercising, it's just something I do. When I'm not doing it, I miss it."
The interview also showed a side of her that rarely reached the book pages. She called herself the "African American Martha Stewart." She custom-dyed and hand-painted linens, lampshades and jeans, and was planning a housewares line under the name T.M.'s Kaleidoscope Designs. Asked about her characters, she said: "They are all flawed, because we are all flawed."
A Day Late and a Dollar Short and the Later Novels
A Day Late and a Dollar Short arrived in 2001 and went to number one on the Publishers Weekly hardcover list after one week, with 720,000 copies in print. Lifetime turned it into a television film in 2014. The books that followed were The Interruption of Everything in 2005, Getting to Happy in 2010, Who Asked You? in 2013, I Almost Forgot About You in 2016 and It's Not All Downhill From Here in 2020. In 2025 she published It Was the Way She Said It, a collection of short fiction and nonfiction.
The Paperback Check and the $6 Million Claim
No publication we could find has made a reported estimate of McMillan's net worth, and this article does not offer one. Her royalties and contract terms have not been made public. What is on the record is a handful of deal figures. The Waiting to Exhale paperback rights sold for $2.64 million in 1992, by the account of Encyclopedia.com and the University of Virginia page, with the $700,000 figure on that same page left unexplained. The Stella film rights went for an undisclosed seven-figure sum. In 1996 she told Salon she "now commands $6 million for a book." That is her own statement, not a published contract, and no later advance has been disclosed.
Lifetime and the California Hall of Fame
Lifetime announced on February 6, 2024, its 40th anniversary year, that McMillan would executive produce Terry McMillan Presents, a slate of original movies for the network. The announcement named no titles.
She received the Essence Literary Awards Lifetime Achievement Award in 2008 and entered the Michigan Women's Hall of Fame in 2010. In March 2026, Governor Newsom and First Partner Siebel Newsom inducted her into the 19th class of the California Hall of Fame. The governor's office described her as "An acclaimed author who wrote Waiting to Exhale, How Stella Got Her Groove Back, and other bestsellers."
Sources
- Terry Mcmillan | Encyclopedia.com
- Terry McMillan | Biography | Research Starters | EBSCOhost
- Terry McMillan - California Museum
- Terry McMillan - Michigan Women Forward
- 20th-Century American Bestsellers.
- Behind the Bestsellers
- A groove of her own - Salon.com
- "Novelist Terry McMillan." Fresh Air Archive: Interviews with Terry Gross
- 'Stella' author out of groove with husband
- Up close with Terry McMillan
- Terry McMillan Teams Up With Lifetime for New Original Movies
- Governor Newsom, First Partner Siebel Newsom induct 19th Class of the California Hall of Fame | Governor of California
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