[In the following review, Schillinger commends McMillan's strong female protagonist and portrayal of desublimated female desire in How Stella Got Her Groove Back. Schillinger concludes, "women are ready to read about themselves not only as schemers or sufferers, but as the adventurous heroes of their own lives."]

Is a happy woman in charge of her own fate de facto an unsympathetic character—someone people don't want to read about and cannot empathize with? If so, the defenders of serious literature will no doubt join in unison to eject Terry McMillan's rip-roaring new book, How Stella Got Her Groove Back, from the Eden of politically and academically correct approval. Because, in How Stella Got Her Groove Back, no women weep; and Stella, in fact, revels. She revels and even gloats at being a woman, revels in being in solitary possession of her mind, her body, her child, her house, her finances, her beauty, her creativity and finally, of her sexy, strapping young dream lover, whom she finds and triumphantly lashes to her side. If this is unserious literature, it is unserious literature of the most serious kind, perhaps even, in its own way, revolutionary.

Terry McMillan is the only novelist I have ever read, apart from writers of children's books, who makes me glad to be a woman. Children's fiction overflows with examples of authoritative girls who control their worlds, fictional and real; from Laura Ingalls Wilder's own Laura, to C. S. Lewis's Lucy, to E. E. Nesbit's Anthea, Lloyd Alexander's Eilonwy, and of course L. Frank Baum's Dorothy—or, perhaps more remarkable, Baum's Ozma of Oz, who actually chose to be transformed from a boy to a girl to claim the Emerald City throne. But the moment the cloak of girlhood is thrown off, and writers choose to write about grown-up girls, any sense of empowerment, opportunity or strength in the female characters is bestowed only to be smashed sooner or later, as the women run through such hurdles as pleasing men, struggling to find a mate, supporting children and, more often than not, coping with emotional, physical or intellectual bullying of some kind, or paying the wages of their own sentimentalized sin.

I was afraid at first that this impression might have been an absurd exaggeration; but then I looked at my bookshelf of favorite books—books I have read and reread, and care about deeply—and was astonished to find my theory amply confirmed. In the A's to F's alone—Amis (both), Austen, Bronte, Cervantes, Dickens, Dostoevsky, Dos Passos, Duras, Eliot, Faulkner, Fitzgerald and Forster—I remembered female characters who, however interesting their tales might have been, principally sought male sanction or suffered, one way or another. Further down the alphabet, in Shakespeare and Wharton, Graham Greene, Hemingway, Virgil, and Maugham, I recalled doomed Lady Macbeth and Lily Bart, prostitutes and spurned wives, the weeping women of the Trojan wars, weeping women, in fact everywhere. (In fairness, I submit, Trollope also makes me glad to be a woman; the exception proves the rule. But then, in his time, and even now, he was often dismissed as an unserious writer.) This seems to beg the question: Does serious literature want women to be subject or else abject? McMillan abundantly proves that if it does, it shouldn't.

Fans of McMillan's previous novels, the hugely popular Waiting to Exhale and the more critically esteemed Disappearing Acts and Mama, will recognize McMillan's authentic, unpretentious voice in every page of How Stella Got Her Groove Back. It is the voice of the kind of woman all of us know and all of us need: the warm, strong, bossy mother/sister/best friend. Fans and enemies alike will also get their share of the brand names that McMillan uses to signify arrival into this country's upper-middle class: BMW and Calvin Klein, Nordstrom's and Macy's. Having just spent an evening with a friend who crowed ecstatically all night over a new pair of Gucci loafers, which did in fact seem to lend her some special glow, I don't find the product emphasis fatuous or crass. Even Emerson recognized that for a woman, which McMillan indubitably is, "the sense of being perfectly well-dressed gives a feeling of inward tranquillity which religion is powerless to bestow." But readers of this book will find more than wise words and icons of wealth; they will find the rare and perhaps unique example of a courtship in which the woman hunts down her own love object herself—and finds the man willing to be wooed.

At the outset of the book, we learn that Stella, 42, an affluent single mom in San Francisco, has gone a little stale, like champagne that's been uncorked and not tasted for too long. She's content, but she spends more time taking care of business and conducting lengthy Molly Bloom-like internal harangues with herself and external harangues with her sisters than trying to find happiness for herself. So, defying her stagnation, she packs herself off to a luxury resort in Jamaica, where from get-go, every young stud's eyes swing appreciatively in her direction. Sure enough, Stella soon finds the "real thing" in the form of a noble, gentle, fine 20-year-old man, Winston Shakespeare. When McMillan describes Stella's first vision of the boy wonder, you want to howl with laughter at her audacity, and shout, "Go, girl!":

When I look at him I almost have a stroke. He is wearing baggy brown shorts and has to be at least six three or four and he is lean but his shoulders are wide broad and as he walks toward my table all I can think is Lord Lord Lord some young girl is gonna get lucky as I don't know what if she can snag you … when he smiles he shows off a beautiful set of straight white teeth that've been hiding behind and under those succulent young lips.

Name another time you've read a man objectified by a woman in this way, if you can. Stella, of course, turns out to be the lucky girl, and soon finds that she's hooked. Back in California, her sister Vanessa encourages her, while her sister Angela moans in despair at the folly of a May-December romance in which her sister is not May. Vanessa boldly comes to Stella's defense: "Men have been dating younger women for [expletive] centuries and does anybody say anything to them?" she sputters. Women may talk like this to each other, but few of us write like this.

To those who say this could never happen in real life, I offer the evidence of the young dive-master I met last summer in Belize under an apricot moon, whose gallantry and openhearted effusiveness restored my own faith in romance, even if he was no Winston Shakespeare. McMillan's book may be the stuff of fantasies, not reality; but if fantasies could be bought whole, every woman in the country would be lining up to buy them from Terry McMillan. And maybe then other writers would dare to write them, too. And, maybe this is happening right now—and fiction at last is about to understand that women are ready to read about themselves not only as schemers or sufferers, but as the adventurous heroes of their own lives.