Tea Cakes Do Get Stale

It's sad, I tell ya! My literary blog has turned into a gossip mill about an author who isn't necessary at the top of my list for literary genious. I, personally, think it was a mistake for Terry to write a book that was loosely based on her island romance. I think it was a mistake for her to let Jonathan "tag along" on her readings/signings and have his own table set up. Not destined to last, age and/or cultural differences aside, this was just a disaster waiting to happen. My internet discussion lists are heating up over this. Misogyny, agism, and good old fashioned "battles of the sexes" are emerging over the particulars of her little liaison. A popular blogger was reprimanded by sfgate.com for reprinting the full text of their article (and the comments for his post got heated as well ... I had some choice words too) and now this Sun Times columnist is adding her two cents.

"There's a new 'Tea Cake' twist.

Back in the day when Zora Neal Hurston wrote 'Their Eyes Were Watching God,' the only thing Janie had to worry about was her lover Tea Cake leaving her for a younger woman. Janie was 'around forty' and Tea Cake was 'around twenty-five.' It never happened, which is one thing that has made Hurston's 1937 love story a classic of black literature.

But romance is a lot messier in real life.

After convincing older women that they can find love with a man half their age, best-selling writer Terry McMillan's Tea Cake has run off -- with a man. Jonathan Plummer was 20 years old and McMillan was 43 when they met while she was staying at a Jamaican resort in 1995. At the time, McMillan had made millions from her novel 'Waiting to Exhale' and was so popular she once complained that she couldn't walk through an airport without sisters stopping her.

But apparently brothers in the United States weren't interested, because McMillan was in Jamaica getting turned on by a local just like legions of other lonely American women who go to the Caribbean looking for romantic adventure. Only McMillan did what a lot of other women wish they could do. She brought the young man home, put him up in her $4 million home, and married him three years later."

I promise to start doing book reviews. Perhaps all of this real life "fiction" is just the push that I need.

Return of The Mc

Cynics might say that the release of this book conveniently coincides with the news of Terry McMillian's tumultuous divorce but, whatever the case, she's back!

"Exhale, Terry McMillan fans: Your wait is over. The Interruption of Everything (Viking Press, $25.95), her sizzling new novel, may be her best yet. Here, the best-selling author opens up about marriage, menopause and the two special men in her life.

Terry McMillan speaks the way she writes, with a snappy rhythm that is at once playful and direct. There’s a musicality to her sentences as she bounces from point to point, extends the beat with anecdotes and then —amazingly —brings it on home. Whether she's writing about Arizona girlfriends who can’t get a decent date in Waiting to Exhale (Viking, $22.95); an older woman loving a younger man in 1996'’s How Stella Got Her Groove Back (Viking, $23.95); or the pain of losing a mother to an asthma attack, which she movingly detailed in her last novel, A Day Late and a Dollar Short (Viking, $25.95), McMillan’s life informs her work so that the characters are rendered with heart and soul.

In The Interruption of Everything, McMillan, 53, uses her fast-paced signature style to immerse readers in the chaotic world of Marilyn Grimes, a fortysomething perimenopausal wife and mother in suburban northern California who's trying to keep the lid on her discontent—and her sanity —without much help from her family. Here McMillan talks about Interruption, her writing process, and life as a best-selling author:"

(click here to read the interview)

Dang! We Old!

I cannot believe how fast time has flown. It seems like its just been a few years since I was driving up to Oakland every other week to a reading/signing at Marcus Books. I was in at least three book clubs and was reading the tons of black fiction being produced by a slew of black female writers. I was somewhat of a snob and basically began to swear of the "dating game" fiction which seemed to be page after page of drama filled relationships with no good men and stupid women.

My favorite authors seemed to disappear for a while. However, the women who "started it all" are a little older, more seasoned and coming up for air with new novels.

"'The black chick-lit books that I've read, it's all about 'gotta find a man' and that's it,' she said. 'These characters just spring up, they don't have a background, they don't have parents, they don't have brother and sisters and concerns.' She has used her novels (the others are 'Good Hair,' 'The Itch' and 'Acting Out') to explore issues like class divisions among blacks, buppie ennui and the juggling acts of even privileged wives and mothers. These issues are a far cry from slavery or the ghetto, which she said she was told in 1989 was what she had to write about to be published.

Ms. McMillan's blockbuster 'Waiting to Exhale' is widely considered the wakeup call to publishers that readers craved stories about the lives of black women.

During the 90's, Mr. Bass said, black women writers like Pearl Cleage, Bebe Moore Campbell, Diane McKinney-Whetstone and Tina McElroy Ansa - all of whom have new or soon-to-be released books - benefited from Ms. McMillan's high profile and staked out their own territory. Their characters, too, reflect more mature lives affected by issues like remarriage and children, career struggles and troubled family members."

(cross posted at State Of The Qusan)

Sounds Like A New Novel

I'm sure she's already heard enough snickers and I told you so's. Let's just hope she's able to translate her latest real life drama into another best seller.

"In a tale rich in lost love, closeted secrets and acrimonious divorce, it turns out that famed local writer Terry McMillan -- whose celebrated romance and subsequent marriage to a man 23 years her junior became the subject of her fictionized best-seller 'How Stella Got Her Groove Back' --

actually got her groove back with a man who now says he's gay.

The story is spilling out in made-for-Hollywood detail in Contra Costa County Superior Court, where McMillan has filed for divorce from her Jamaican- born husband of six years, Jonathan Plummer.

McMillan, 53, said in court documents that the marriage was based on a 'fraud'' because Plummer lied about his sexual orientation -- and married her only to gain U.S. citizenship.

'It was devastating to discover that a relationship I had publicized to the world as life-affirming and built on mutual love was actually based on deceit,'' she wrote in her declaration. 'I was humiliated.'

Plummer, 30, countered in court papers of his own that McMillan has turned on him with a 'homophobic'' vengeance and is trying to force his return to an uncertain future in Jamaica. He wants to void the couple's prenuptial agreement that would keep from him most of the millions she's earned as a writer.

He also claims he was denied his full share of royalties, as spelled out in the prenup, from 'How Stella Got Her Groove Back,' the fictionalized account of a single mother's torrid relationship with a Jamaican young enough to be her son that very much parallels the lives of McMillan and Plummer."

(cross posted at State Of The Qusan)