Disappearing Acts is a narrative that works to undermine popular romance’s promise that two people in love can overcome the social conditions that might impede their happiness. When Zora meets Franklin, she quickly relinquishes her recent resolution to maintain her equanimity when faced with sexual desire. Franklin assumes the position of power. Zora, despite her steady job, artistic talent, education, and middle-class family ties, has less power to determine the outcome of the relationship than Franklin, who has none of these advantages. It becomes Zora’s responsibility not only inobtrusively to support him financially but also to support his fragile sense of well-being.

Her autonomy is threatened further by two unwanted pregnancies. She aborts the first without consulting Franklin, who is then furious for what he considers her duplicity. She tells him immediately about the second pregnancy. He wants the baby and promises to divorce his wife before the baby is born. Zora must now prepare for the child, support the household, and sympathize with Franklin about his current unemployment and tortured past. Although she continues to grant him authority, he can only respond with irritated resentment of her abilities, which continually threaten his tenuous sense of control.

Their son’s birth does nothing to bring the couple under the protective umbrella of a nuclear family. Franklin is jealous of the infant. To assume the role of caregiver would be too much of a threat to his machismo; hence when Zora returns to work, she must arrange for child care, care for the baby at home, and carry out the other domestic chores as well. After he rapes her, Zora asks Franklin to leave, but he refuses. Finally, reluctantly, she goes to the police, but Franklin does not leave her apartment without wrecking it first. Devastated by the destruction, Zora still takes responsibility for his actions, because she feels guilty for having turned against him, just like everyone else.

The novel’s conclusion does not conform to a generic plot formula of reunited bliss and forgiveness. Franklin does return one evening after several months of absence; he is employed and in college, and their sexual passion is quickly reignited. Yet he is not back to stay, and Zora is leaving New York. When she suggests that he come and get her and their baby when he is divorced, he refrains from telling her that, in fact, his divorce is already final. As the novel ends, they are settling down for a night of intellectual and sexual games, but Terry McMillan lets the reader see no further into the future of this relationship.

McMillan’s disturbingly realistic novel responds to an ideology that calls for the reinstatement and continuation of the conventional nuclear family. McMillan resists being written by the discourse of traditional patriarchal domesticity. In her novels Mama (1987), Disappearing Acts, and Waiting to Exhale (1992), this hegemonic discourse is reconfigured. McMillan’s polemical fiction aims to demonstrate that the myth of the perfect family is a damaging one. As such false models deny race, ethnic, and class diversity, they encourage a common sense of guilt, betrayal, and rage, since most people cannot live up to the myth’s ideological values. In a significant feminist gesture, McMillan creates contemporary families that allocate to men a different space from the patriarchal center they have come to expect.

In an interview in the Boston Globe , McMillan explains that women are reading her novels “because they identify—because they want to say, ‘I was there, I’m not there anymore,’ or ‘I’m still there.’ They kiss me, they hug me, they cry, they say thank...