Looking for Mr. Right : Terry McMillan Has Struck a Nerve With Novel About Men Who Fear Commitment and Women Who Fear Growing Old Alone

OAKLAND — Terry McMillan is late. Several hundred fans, mostly black and female, are shoehorned into Marcus Bookstore on a recent Saturday night. Several hundred more form a line down the block and around the corner.

The reading from her new novel hasn’t begun because McMillan is greeting those who couldn’t squeeze inside.

“She’s been walking the line,” announces Blanche Richardson, whose family owns the store, one of the nation’s largest and oldest African-American bookstores. The crowd cheers.

Finally, the writer, amid cries of “Girlfriend!,” steps through the throng.

“I don’t even believe this,” McMillan shouts. “I feel like a rap artist or something!”

She starts to read from the new book, “Waiting to Exhale,” and the place sounds like church. Knowing “Ummm-hummms” and a few quiet “Amens” drift up from the audience.

The novel, her third, is a tale of four professional black women who have it all except for Mr. You-Know-Who. At issue is men’s fear of commitment.

The women, frustrated to tears over failed relations with black men, call them “unreliable . . . irresponsible . . . too possessive . . . dogs . . . shallow . . . arrogant . . . childish . . . wimps . . .”

Not everyone appreciates McMillan’s views. “It’s as if we’re listening to four foul-mouthed stand-up comedians--all of them lashing out blindly at men,” Charles R. Larson, a professor of literature at American University, wrote in a Chicago Tribune review.

Nevertheless, this book is hot. It’s in its seventh printing--195,000 copies--since publication on May 28. Bidding on the paperback rights, expected to take place at the end of this month, will begin at $700,000. McMillan is in the midst of a 20-city book tour. She’s done Oprah and “Today” and is setting a date with Arsenio.

McMillan, 40, lives in the posh town of Danville, about 20 miles east of Oakland. Her neighborhood, at the edge of a grassy knoll, is lined with BMWs, a Mercedes, a Ferrari Testarossa.

Wearing jeans and a sleeveless top, she plops down on the floor and leans against a couch. She lives here with her 8-year-old son, Solomon Welch. The living room, awash in sunlight, is filled with elegant African-American art. In her office, the walls are lined with Solomon’s artwork and school commendations.

Though warm and gracious, McMillan has little patience with platitudes. She says she is concerned with certain “behavioral problems found in a few men.”

“I call them little wusses,” McMillan says, waving a cigarette like a weapon.

“They keep up this facade, like they’ve got everything under control,” says McMillan. “But the minute you get them behind closed doors, they fall apart. Once they come to their senses, they say, ‘Oh, my goodness, she saw my weak side.’ That’s where the fear of commitment stuff comes in.

“Men, you break their hearts, and--swear to God--it’s like you just blew their brains out. You’d swear it was the Apocalypse. They get more distant and women are confused. We don’t get it.

“Then we start going crazy. ‘What did we do wrong? Were we too aggressive? Did we say something they didn’t like?’ Eventually, we say, ‘Forget him,’ and we move on to man No. 18.”

Her book’s sub-theme, the fear of growing old alone, has touched men and women of all races.

“There is a real strong identity with some of the things these women are experiencing, and not just among black women. I’m hearing a lot from white women,” McMillan says. “There are millions of women out here now in America between the ages of 30 and 40 who are well-educated, attractive, self-sufficient and having a hell of a time finding Mr. Right.”

Richardson of Marcus bookstore says the writer isn’t a male basher. “I don’t know any black woman who loves black men more, and with a passion. It’s because she loves them so much that she wants them to get their act right so that we can all get one. We want men to stop whining and crying about how they can’t make a commitment.”

“She’s tapping into a certain kind of contemporary sisterhood,” says Barbara Christian, an African-American studies professor at UC Berkeley. “These women are friends and they accept each other’s faults. They deal with each other in relation to their love lives, children, work lives.”

“Reviewers are acting as though it’s kind of refreshing to realize these women do have problems, even though they appear to have it made,” McMillan says. “That’s the point: A house and a car and all the money in the bank won’t make you happy. People need people. People crave intimacy. I have a BMW, but I’d trade that in for a man any day. You can have the best-seller lists for Mr. Right.”

McMillan says she has had positive responses from men. “I’ve been to nine cities and have had some very, very large African-American audiences, a lot of which have included more men than I’ve seen in a long time,” McMillan says.

“I’ve had some guys say they are reading the book twice. One brother in Philadelphia stood up in front of 1,199 people to say, ‘I think I speak for a lot of brothers. I know I’m all over the book. . . . All I can say is, I’m willing to learn. Being defensive is not the answer.’ Then he said, ‘Thank you,’ and a lot of the brothers clapped and the sisters stood up.

“What’s happening is what I prayed would happen: That they would realize I was not trying to be offensive, nor was I trying to insult who they were. It was basically a way to just point out some of the things some of them do to make it hard for us to love them.”

“What makes me write? Dissatisfaction. Things that I really think should be different,” she says.

In addition to fiction, McMillan has just completed a screenplay based on her 1989 second novel, “Disappearing Acts,” for MGM, a book that drew an unsuccessful libel suit from her former lover, Solomon’s father. She also edited the acclaimed 1990 “Breaking Ice: An Anthology of Contemporary African-American Fiction.”

The anthology was perhaps inspired by her own early life in which black literature played no part.

McMillan grew up in Port Huron, Mich., one of five children. The only book in her home was the family Bible. When she was 13, her parents divorced. Her mother worked for Ford Motor Co. sewing leather stripping onto auto upholstery. When she was 16, Terry took a job at the public library.

McMillan didn’t know African-Americans wrote books until she saw James Baldwin’s face on a cover.

In the introduction to “Breaking Ice,” she wrote, “I remember feeling embarrassed and did not read this book because I was afraid. I couldn’t imagine that he’d have anything better or different to say than Thomas Mann, Henry Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner and a horde of other mostly white male writers that I’d been introduced to in Literature 101 in high school. . . .”

Reading Alex Haley’s “The Autobiography of Malcolm X” “literally changed my life,” she wrote. “First and foremost, I realized that there was no reason to be ashamed of being black . . . that we had a history, and much to be proud of.”

At UC Berkeley, where she studied journalism, McMillan enrolled in a class on African-American literature: “I couldn’t believe the rush I felt over and over once I discovered Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Ann Petry, Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, Jean Toomer, Richard Wright, and rediscovered and read James Baldwin.”

McMillan’s published her first short story when she was 25. In 1987, Houghton Mifflin published her first novel, “Mama,” written while she worked as a word processor and cared for her infant son alone. She launched her own promotion, mailing 3,000 letters to booksellers and universities and scheduling her own tour. “Mama” sold out its first printing before the publication date.

That same year, McMillan proposed “Breaking Ice” to Viking. “I went through the last nine years of anthologies, and I could count on one hand the number of black writers there were. I thought, ‘Are they trying to say we don’t write short stories? Or our stories aren’t good enough?’

“I think the publishing industry has been slow in accepting us in large numbers. But now it’s almost like black literature is a new trend, just like black films are.

“It’s as if black writers are a select group, that we can’t be merged with the great mainstream of writers. I don’t have a problem with being a black writer, but when you single my work out, and package it because I’m black, that’s when it bothers me. I choose authors to read by the works, not by the color of their skin.”

McMillan has been reproved for not directly addressing racism in her books. “Don’t criticize me because you didn’t get what you expected,” she responds. “I said it just the way I wanted to say it. I didn’t deal with overt racism because that was not my primary concern.”

After the reading at Marcus Bookstore, a man challenges McMillan’s novel for ignoring the victimization of young black males by poverty, racism and high murder rate.

“Intelligent people don’t read literature in terms of how a few characters are supposed to be representative of the whole,” she rejoins sharply, her voice lifting.

“What I’m doing here is not dogging brothers. I cannot solve the problems between the Bloods and the Crips in my book. But the bottom line is--if we treated each other a little better, starting from childhood, maybe our sons wouldn’t be killing each other.”