Word: mcmillan
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...McMillan may be--in fact, no question, she is--a better story than her latest book. As the first wildly successful black pop novelist, she is, as they say, looking good, an attractive woman of about 5 ft. 7 in., taking her ease in an oversize white sweatshirt, jeans and sneakers after a morning photo shoot. For the moment, turbulence is below the surface, but as McMillan's longtime agent Molly Friedrich says, "You don't meet Terry, you experience Terry. She's truly a force of nature...
...which has set the table for McMillan's staggering $6 million boodle from Stella (that's the figure she divulged at a black writers' conference in Brooklyn, New York, in March). Viking is printing 800,000 hard copies of the book. Book-of-the-Month Club bought the novel two years ago, as one of its main selections, sight unseen, before it was even written. The movie rights for Stella have also been sold, for an undisclosed seven-figure bundle...
...McMillan, the most self-revelatory writer in the world--this week, anyway--she grouses that "nobody would dream of asking Toni Morrison who she is sleeping with." Later, her Jamaican friend Plummer, a slim, amiable fellow who studies hotel management at Diablo Valley College, pokes his head into her cluttered office. He admits that he is "flattered" to be the model for Stella's Winston Shakespeare, though "I don't really read books." "But he will," says McMillan, "or else he's moving." Laughter all around...
...dubious sort of good luck that the publication of her slightest and fluffiest novel has brought McMillan her greatest reward. The new book starring "Winston" burbles along cheerfully but lacks the satirical bite of Waiting to Exhale. There isn't much to the story, which amounts to woman meets boy, gets boy, with no second act, so the author will have to crank up some misery if she carries out her plans to write the screenplay. You can't have a movie without conflict...
...critics will ultimately judge McMillan is a good question. Will she turn out to be, like Danielle Steele and Judith Krantz, just one more queen of the steamy, scented stuff that the publishing industry calls "commercial"? It's possible. But so far McMillan has not written formula glop. And most of the time her chapters, though they can rank nearly as high as Steele's and Krantz's in breathy descriptions of dressing, undressing and furniture, have a brassy realism that saves them from the trash bin. And even though peace has broken out in the author's life, with...