Word: stella
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News flash: Terry McMillan's big-bucks new novel How Stella Got Her Groove Back (Viking; 368 pages; $23.95) is a silly wish-fulfillment fantasy that barely qualifies as beach literature. Heroine Stella Payne is a beautiful, single, "forty-bleeping-two-year-old" black investment analyst who, though sexy and rich, hasn't had a date in months. Tired of waiting for a black prince to materialize in a paid-for Lexus, she flies to Jamaica on vacation, meets Winston Shakespeare, a tall, golden-brown, bashful 20-year-old assistant cook at a resort hotel, falls in love, and brings...
Correction to news flash: Stella isn't fantasy after all. Author McMillan, 44, single, renowned for griping raucously about no-account African-American men in her bestselling 1992 novel Waiting to Exhale, flew to Jamaica on vacation last June and fell in love with tall, golden-brown, bashful, 20-ish resort hotel employee Jonathan Plummer. They now live together, happily ever after, in McMillan's big house in Danville, California. "I don't anticipate us being together for the rest of my life," says the reflexively blunt author, "but right now it works and it's good...
...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...
...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...
...Stella, in Stella, picks up a copy of Exhale, reads 50 or 60 pages and drops it with the offhand comment that "I don't know what all the hoopla is about and why everybody thinks she's such a hot writer. Hell, I could write the same stuff she writes." Sure, Stella; in your dreams. Which are what pop novels, even largely autobiographical ones, are all about...