A customer scans the racks of casual fashions in Forget Me Not, a Danville boutique. She pulls out the new spring dresses, and she holds the latest jeans in front of her. At first glance she is just another shopper, cooing over the newest styles, asking for advice and yakking it up with shop owner, Janice Glazier. On closer inspection, she looks familiar. Hasn’t she been on Oprah a few times?
That customer is Danville resident and best selling author Terry McMillan. She loves the fashions sold at Forget Me Not and one recent rainy morning found her perusing fashionable threads, sipping coffee and laughing with friends.
“How long have I been coming here?” McMillan calls out to friend Glazier while she checks out the new arrivals. The shop owner shrugs her shoulders in answer. Both agree, the writer’s been a regular for years.
The woman who put her voice into best selling novels, “Waiting to Exhale” and “How Stella Got Her Groove Back,” McMillan likes many things about her home in Danville and is frequently spotted dining downtown, cruising the aisles of Safeway, or waiting at Lawrence’s Walnut Creek Meats counter in Alamo.
She fell in love with Northern California during her college days at UC Berkeley in the ’70s. She moved to Danville in 1990 when her son Solomon was 6. McMillan said she remembered choosing the area for its many amenities, but the real reason she relocated her family to the San Ramon Valley is simpler.
“I moved here for my son,” said McMillan. “I wanted him to enjoy being a kid, and he had a great childhood here.”
When she first came to town, she rented a house in the Shadow Creek development. Eventually, she bought a place in Blackhawk. Over time, McMillan developed a good support system locally. Everyone had children the same age. She was able to blend into the community as there are many people “of note” in the area and, importantly, residents respected her privacy.
“People recognize me all the time,” said McMillan. “But in most of the places I go, I’m just part of the scene. Like a piece of furniture or something.”
McMillan’s son Solomon led an idyllic life in the shadows of Mount Diablo. He played local sports, waded in the local creek with friends, and rode in go-carts on the street in front of their house with kids from the neighborhood.
“Christmas mornings were the best. All the kids out playing in front of the house, it just made me glad to watch,” recalled McMillan.
For McMillan, life in Danville couldn’t be more different than her life growing up in the hardscrabble town of Port Huron, Mich. She was the oldest of five children, raised by a single mom who divorced her alcoholic and abusive dad. Books weren’t big in her home, and it took a job at the local library shelving books to introduce McMillan to literature greats like Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson. She moved to Los Angeles as soon as she turned 18 and began taking classes at Los Angeles City College.
Once in college, she took a class in African American Literature and discovered writers of color such as Richard Wright, Zora Neale Hurston, Jean Toomer and Ann Petry, all of whom would influence her fiction. Eventually, she transferred to UC Berkeley, where she took her first fiction-writing class en route to a degree in journalism.
After graduating from Cal in 1979, McMillan headed east to pursue a master’s degree in screenwriting at Columbia. According to her biography, she dropped out of the program after finding the environment in the early 1980s racist.
Her study plans changed, but her commitment to writing did not waver. She joined the Harlem Writers’ Guild and went to artist colonies such as Yaddo in upstate New York, and MacDowell, in New Hampshire, to hone her craft.
She stayed in New York City for several years and she had her share of struggles. She battled addiction and endured the end of a long-term relationship that left her raising Solomon alone.
Despite the hardship, she continued writing. She woke early every morning, wrote for a couple of hours, and then readied herself and her son for the day. At 36, with a young son depending on her, McMillan’s first book, “Mama, A Novel” was published.
Dissatisfied with the lack of publicity her publisher was providing for her book, McMillan took the matter into her own hands. She sent 3,000 letters to different African American colleges and bookstores around the country to generate interest in her novel. Her aggressive marketing strategy worked and “Mama” went into reprint six weeks after its release.
Since her first novel hit bookstores, McMillan has published five other novels, three of which were made into movies. She worked on the screenplay adaptation for her books “Waiting to Exhale” and “How Stella Got Her Groove Back” with Academy Award winner Ron Bass, whose credits include “Rainman” and the screen adaptation of Amy Tan’s “The Joy Luck Club.”
“Ron is brilliant,” McMillan said. “In terms of screenplay writing, he’s a structuralist so his input in helping organize the adaptation was invaluable for both ‘Exhale’ and ‘Stella.'”
McMillan is different from other writers who are categorized in African American Literature. Her work only lightly deals with issues of race and is known in the publishing world as having mainstream appeal. Her fiction receives far-reaching praise and the contemporary best selling writer is regularly compared to greats Toni Morrison and Alice Walker.
A self-avowed morning person, McMillan still writes early everyday. For years, it was a requirement, then it was the only quiet time of day. Now, writing is just part of her daily rhythm.
“Writing is like brushing my teeth and exercising, it’s just something I do. When I’m not doing it, I miss it,” she said.
She spends about four hours a day crafting her character-driven stories. She carefully outlines her characters and says that her characters tell her the stories she writes. She often doesn’t know how her books are going to end until she gets there.
The characters in her book also tell something about how McMillan views herself and the world around her: “They are all flawed, because we are all flawed.”
Danville frequently steals its way into her writing. In her latest work, “The Interruption of Everything,” the protagonist was inspired by some of the women she sees in Danville, who sacrifice their own identity for their family. And smaller details such as the chandeliers sold in Forget Me Not become part of the story’s rich sub-plots.
When she is done writing, McMillan’s alter ego takes over and governs the rest of her day. Unknown to many, Terry is the self-proclaimed African American Martha Stewart. She specializes in custom dyed and hand-painted linens and lampshades. She also paints jeans, purses and shoes. She shudders when she mentions how much she spends at Richard’s Arts, Crafts and Framing in Alamo.
“I spend thousands there. I spend so much they help me to my truck,” said McMillan with a laugh.
The avid crafter fills her garage and spare bedrooms in her home with her labors of love. In fact, she hasn’t been able to park in her garage for most of the last year and a half.
“I have given away enough sheets and lampshades to fill a hotel and hand-painted jeans to fill a rack at BCBG,” said McMillan.
This creative outlet is offering McMillan a chance to spread her artistic wings and soar into a new venture: She is set to launch her own brand of housewares, T.M.’s Kaleidoscope Designs, either late this year or early next year. She plans to start with two product lines: the custom linens will be sold under the name “Excitement in Bed,” and lampshades will be sold as “Light Shades Away.”
And this new undertaking hasn’t slowed down her writing career; her latest release, “It’s OK if You’re Clueless and 23 More Tips for the College Bound” hit book stores this week. It’s based on the commencement speech she gave at her son’s high school graduation in 2002.
Wanting a unique approach to the traditional advice given graduates, McMillan compiled her own list of tips for students ranging from “see the world” to “don’t listen to your parents.” She even printed a pamphlet for the graduates and their families. She received so many requests for copies that she decided to turn it into a book. Her newest book may not be her longest, but it’s filled with McMillan’s classic wit and sass.
With her career taking on new dimensions, her marriage to Jonathan Plummer ending in a high-profile divorce, and her son graduating from Stanford this spring, McMillan isn’t sure how long she will remain in the area. When she moved here 15 years ago, the area was largely agricultural and perfect for her son. Now that he is grown, she is ready for something new.
She’s been looking around but is shell-shocked by the price of Bay Area real estate and marvels at the number of homes in the area selling for more than a million dollars in the area. Of the inflated costs and the hot market, she remarks to fellow shoppers at Forget Me Not, “I want to know what these people do for a living.”
The patrons chuckle and nod in agreement: It is hard to believe so many people are still able to afford homes in the area. But when the fashions are good, the coffee hot and the laughter flowing, it’s hard to worry too much about that and easier to see if that cute blouse with the floral stitching comes in the right size.
Books by Terry McMillan
Fiction:
* “Mama” (1987) Follows the life of Mildred Peacock and her five children.
* “Disappearing Acts” (1989) Explores the love affair of Zora Banks, a teacher, and Franklin Swift, a frequently unemployed construction worker.
* “Waiting to Exhale” (1992) Chronicles the lives of four educated African American women living in Phoenix, Arizona.
* “How Stella Got Her Groove Back” (1996) Charts the experience of a business executive who travels to Jamaica to escape life and finds love.
* “A Day Late and A Dollar Short” (2001) Traces the story of an African American family with all its ups and downs.
“The Interruption of Everything” (2005) Finds a middle-aged woman redefining her life when her children leave home.
Non-Fiction:
* “It’s OK if You’re Clueless and 23 More Tips for the College Bound” (2006) Advice on life for teens graduating from high school.
Anthology:
* “Breaking Ice: An Anthology of Contemporary African American Fiction” (1990) edited by McMillan
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