The book was transformed into a blockbuster major motion picture, starring Whitney Houston and Angela Bassett, and McMillan single-handedly altered the way the homogenous publishing industry handled signing writers, particularly black authors, forever.
“You made history. You changed the industry. You changed lives,” says Tom Joyner Morning Show’s Sybil Wilkes, who hosted the advanced book reading on the Tom Joyner Fantastic Voyage. “You changed a generation of writers with Waiting to Exhale.”
On the Caribbean cruise, McMillan announced what she originally vowed she would never do: write a sequel to Waiting to Exhale. She also gave fans in attendance — including actor/author Blair Underwood — a tasty treat by reading excerpts of the sequal, Getting to Happy.
McMillan said she has spent the last decade and a half avoiding Waiting to Exhale like a contagious illness, despite the fact that throngs of her fans literally begged her to revisit the beloved characters. The award-winning writer said that when she relented and decided to do a sequel, she never felt she was competing against herself.
“I don’t know as a writer that you can compete against yourself,” she says, draped in a lovely gown during the Tom Joyner Fantastic Voyage’s Pajama Night. “I never thought of it that way. Writing this book was purely happenstance. I, as everybody knows, have been through a lot since the first book. I realized that I wanted to tell a story of the women who are almost 50. The kids are almost gone or gone. And I wanted to know what it was like to have start your life over. Also, when you suffer from losses and women are betrayed” McMillan says of showing how her characters rebounded from that malady.
One of the reasons McMillan never fathomed a sequel is because, quite frankly, she found the female characters in Waiting to Exhale quite nauseating.
“When you break up with your boyfriend, do you want to go back to him?” McMilan asked Wilkes, to which she replied “Sometimes” which ignited raucous laughter. “I was sick of those women,” McMillan began after the laughter subsided. “Part of it, and I know some people are going to say it was weird, but part of it was that it was a little embarrassing because of all of the hoopla.”
The explosive fame that came with Waiting to Exhale is definitely a double-edged sword that impaled McMillan’s comfort zone and peace of mind, she told the rapt audience.
“They always want to make it seem that I was the first one to make a baby. But I was not the first one to make a baby. I mean, I appreciate the respect and all that, but there was so much that came out of this novel. … If I had set out to do what this book reportedly caused, then I would have been able to take more credit.”
The good that came out of it is that “they were reminded that black people do read. Problem is, we read their books, they don’t read ours,” added the accomplished author.
McMillan’s turbulent personal life has been well documented. So, fittingly, Wilkes asked McMillan if she has arrived at a level of happiness as Getting to Happy prepares to be released this fall.
“Yes,” she said. “A year ago, I forgave my ex-husband. I’ve seen him a couple of times. He’s not going to be my BFF. The anger was like termites that [were] eating me up. That person that I turned into to defend my integrity, I was not used to that. It was taxing and ugly. But I got my spirit back. And when you get your spirit back, there’s not much more to it than that.” –terry shropshire
