| Terry McMillan | |
|---|---|
Terry McMillan at the 2008 Brooklyn Book Festival. |
|
| Born | October 18, 1951 |
| Occupation | Writer |
| Nationality | American |
| Alma mater | University of California, Berkeley |
| Notable work(s) | How Stella Got Her Groove Back |
Terry McMillan (born October 18, 1951,[1] in Port Huron, Michigan) is an American author. Her interest in books comes from working at a library when she was sixteen. She received her BA in journalism in 1986 at University of California, Berkeley. Her work is characterized by strong female protagonists.
Her first book, Mama, was published in 1987. She achieved national attention in 1992 with her third novel, Waiting to Exhale, which remained on The New York Times bestseller list for many months. In 1995, Forest Whitaker turned it into a film starring Whitney Houston. In 1998, another of McMillan's novels, How Stella Got Her Groove Back, was made into a movie. McMillan's novel Disappearing Acts was subsequently produced as a direct-to-cable feature, starring Wesley Snipes and Sanaa Lathan. She also wrote the best seller A Day Late and a Dollar Short. The Interruption of Everything was published on July 19, 2005. Getting to Happy, the long-awaited sequel to Waiting to Exhale, was published on September 7, 2010.
McMillan married Jamaican Jonathan Plummer in 1998; she was in her mid 40s and he in his early 20s. He was the inspiration for the love interest of the main character in her novel How Stella Got Her Groove Back. Her life did not follow the movie when in December 2004, Plummer told McMillan that he was gay; in March 2005, she filed for divorce.[2] The divorce was settled for an undisclosed amount. In March 2007, McMillan sued Plummer and his lawyer for $40 million, citing an intentional strategy to embarrass and humiliate her during the divorce proceedings;[3] McMillan eventually won a judgement of intentional infliction of emotional distress, but had withdrawn the suit before the case went to trial; Plummer was never ordered to pay the intended amount. On 27 September 2010, the two sat together with talk show host Oprah Winfrey to discuss their post-divorce relationship and partial reconciliation; both acknowledged that he fulfilled the role of boyfriend and husband before his coming-out, although McMillan stated that "he's not my BFF".[4]