SOURCE: "My Novel, Myself," in Village Voice, May 21, 1996, pp. 41-2.

[In the following interview, McMillan discusses her critical reception and autobiographical aspects of her fiction, particularly in How Stella Got Her Groove Back.]

The thing to remember about Terry McMillan is that she's very much a diva, and not just by reputation. With her high cheekbones and almond-shaped eyes, she actually looks the part, even if she seems somewhat younger than her 44 years and is smaller than I'd expected. Her voice is deep, mature, and sounds slightly edgy as she explains she's just finished doing 19 interviews. She became a phenomenon after the success of Waiting To Exhale, both as a book and a movie, and earned a $6 million advance for her latest novel, How Stella Got Her Groove Back. It's a breathless tale of a middle-aged woman who falls for a 20-year-old while vacationing in Jamaica, and much has been written about the similarities between the novel and McMillan's real life—which includes a young Jamaican boyfriend she met on the island last summer.

"How long is this gonna take?" she says, after giving me the once-over. I'd heard about her abrasiveness, but when I say an hour, she says okay, and politely ushers me into her hotel suite.

Not long after we sit down, Jonathan Plummer, the "souvenir" Time magazine says McMillan brought back from her trip last year, pokes his head out from the adjoining room. For all the speculation about Plummer being the love interest in McMillan's latest novel, he bears little resemblance to Stella's tropical boy toy. Lanky, slightly stooped, and self-effacing, he's dressed more like a B-boy than a sexy rent-a-dread from Negril. He seems a little uncomfortable with all the attention, but McMillan assures me he's getting used to it. After the brief introduction, he retreats to the other room.

This seems like as good an opening as any to start talking about the personal issues in McMillan's work.

[Porter:] People assume your work is autobiographical, that Terry McMillan is Stella, I say, Is she?

[McMillan:] "Stella isn't a reinvention of myself. She's only part of my persona. I can't believe people actually think my life is like that. What I give [my characters] are my concerns, which for the most part are grounded in reality."

Are you the person that you see written about?

"Pretty much, with the exception of Time magazine. [The writer] had a chip on his shoulder from the first line."

More has been written about you than about your work.

"Thank you. That was my point."

Why?

"I think the film may have had something to do with it, and I understand that. But especially with Stella, everybody wants to know how much of it is real. How much of it is true. If I said, 'all of it,' what does that mean? People spend a lot of time trying to draw similarities between my life and my work. I've gotten it with every book. 'Which character is you in Waiting To Exhale, girl?' Do you think if I was Robin [the sexually promiscuous character], that I would admit it? I mean come on—dingbat that she was. I don't think so!"

Sure, but some of the characters in your novels bear a strong resemblance to you, so maybe that has something to do with it?

"Probably. But in Waiting To Exhale, out of all the things those women went through, only two of those experiences came close to what I've been through. And even those were lies. But the bottom line is, as a writer I understand or I'm trying to understand what makes people tick. I try to make the characters believable, realistic. I think when people meet me, they're more comfortable assuming that I'm one of these characters because then it makes me not this icon, this larger-than-life figure. I think that's one of the reasons fans do it. On the other hand, I think this guy from Time was trying to show that I hadn't written a novel at all—you know what I'm saying. That it was simply a reenactment of my life, which I really resent. Because he wasn't there. You know."

For all the media's winking about excessive self-disclosure, McMillan has yet to write about some of the more difficult things in her life—the deaths in recent years of one of her closest friends and her mother. Even as Exhale was rising to the top of the charts, she was abandoning A Day Late and a Dollar Short, a tale about a mother and daughter. McMillan's new novel, written in just a month, marked an end to her writer's block.

Was writing Stella therapeutic?

"Of course. Definitely. Cathartic."

In a way that A Day Late and a Dollar Short was not?

"No, no. You can't compare the two. I don't do that."

Because it was about your mother, right?

"No! No! Nope. Not about my mother. It's about a woman who's in her fifties who in some ways has a part of my mother's persona, but she's not my mother. I had my mother in mind. I just wanted to explore that and I thought about some of the things my mother had said to me and my sisters over the years and that's how it started. But once I lost my mother, it was too close—the idea of writing about a mother who is a little bit too intrusive and invasive in her adult children's lives, I couldn't go there emotionally. I didn't want to.

"Stella was different. I embraced that. I hadn't intended to write it. It dictated to me that it wanted to be written and I just sort of paid attention. I hadn't written in almost two years. So when it started coming out, I just gave in to it. I just sort of succumbed, surrendered. And I was not going to stop. I didn't really think it was a novel I was writing. At first it was a poem. Then a little short story. Jonathan was the one who encouraged me. Didn't you, Jonathan?" she yells in the direction of the other room.

[Plummer:] "Yeah, I guess so," he mutters back.

[McMillan:] "What do you mean you guess so?" she says, in a way that seems to demand a stronger reply.

"You did!"

Jonathan emerges from the other room, briefly interrupting the interview.

"I said to Jonathan, you'll see some things in here that you can kind of recognize, but it's not going to be everything that happened between you and me, is it now?" she says, glancing in his direction.

Were you apprehensive about getting involved with someone much younger than you?

"Yeah! Yeah! Wait, let me say goodbye to Jonathan…."

She trails off to walk him to the door. There's a brief exchange between the two—a shared joke—and the kind of physical intimacy one usually sees in young couples. Surprisingly, the somewhat brash McMillan seems uncharacteristically girlish, almost giggly and coy, with Plummer. After he leaves, she settles back into the chair.

So what about being involved with a much younger man?

"I think as women we almost inherently question anything that makes us happy. I don't think I thought about it very long. But if you had told me a year ago that I'd be going out with someone in their twenties, I would have laughed in your face. I would've said, 'I don't go out with children.' Really. I'd never even thought about it."

Part of the attraction, she admits, is that Plummer didn't know who she was. "He'd never even heard of my book, which was great," she chuckles. "Plus I didn't really give a shit at the time, to be honest. Because I wasn't really thinking that way. All I was thinking was what a good-looking young man he was and one day somebody was going to be verrry happy. I don't think it's so much robbing the cradle, it's more like the way interracial couples were years ago."

So far, she's got no regrets. "Life is really short, too short. My girlfriend wasn't even 50 and my mother was 59 when she died. I was thinking, shit, if I blink, I'll be 59. And I don't want to be one of these 'wish I coulda, woulda, shoulda.' Right now it's been almost a year with Jonathan. And it's been a good year. And if it's over next month, I'll be heartbroken. But the bottom line is it's been a good year, a damn good year. That's why I wrote the book, so I wouldn't forget it."

In interviews and even in your novels, you've become somewhat notorious for—

"Being so profane?" McMillan asks, slightly bemused. "Oh, I can be when you piss me off. When I was being interviewed by the reporter from Time, she was being really probing. I said to her, 'If I were Toni Morrison, would you be asking me these fucking questions? Do you ask Anne Tyler who she was sleeping with before she wrote her last book?' I don't think so. 'Do you ask Danielle Steele?' No!

"I was upset because when they interview white writers, they don't ask them what kind of car they drive, or what kind of house they live in. What has that got to do with my work? If I were white they wouldn't ask me these fuckin' questions. And sure enough that's what that muthafucker put in the article. See, now I'm swearing, because they made me mad.

"There are going to be people out there that are going to review the book for what it is. And of course, there are people who are going to review me. There's a backlash to success, especially if you're black and female—black and/ or female.

"You know my mama used to say, 'Always have a thick skin, because people are gonna talk about you if you do, and talk about you if you don't. So fuck 'em.'

"If I'd stopped and thought about the fact that I am writing this novel and people are going to find out that I have this young boyfriend and they're going to think that all this stuff is real, I wouldn't have been able to write anything. But I didn't stop long enough to worry about it. All I thought about was my story, and telling it, and feeling it. And that's how I write. And that's why I write."