-The Writer Magazine July 10, 2001
An exuberant return to the four unforgettable heroines of Waiting to Exhale--the novel that changed African American fiction forever.
All four are learning to heal past hurts and to reclaim their joy and their dreams; but they return to us full of spirit, sass, and faith in one another. They've exhaled: now they are learning to breathe.
"Being a lifetime wife and mother has afforded me the luxury of having multiple and even simultaneous careers: I’ve been a chauffeur. A chef. An interior decorator. A landscape architect, as well as a gardener. I’ve been a painter. A furniture restorer. A personal shopper. A veterinarian’s assistant and sometimes the veterinarian.... An accountant, a banker, and on occasion, a broker. I’ve been a beautician...
My career has sent me down red carpets, put me up in fancy hotels and flown around the world at leat twice, Still, I always saw myself with the other proud parents: sitting in the audience, choking back tears as my one and only child walked across the stage to accept his high school diploma. When I was asked to be the guest speaker at the commencement ceremony I said no.
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"I had 'em so fast they felt more like a litter, except each one turned out to be a different animal. Paris is a female lion who don't roar loud enough. lewis is a horse who don't pull his own weight. Charlotte is definitely a bull, and Janelle would have to be a sheep -- a lamb is closer to it -- 'cause she always being led out to some pasture and don't know how she got there." - Viola Price introducing her children.
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"But I'm tired of jumping up. Tired of running. I would like to be able to just sit there with my son without moving without wishing I were somewhere else doing something else without thinking about something else and I'd like to just hold his hand or put my arm around his narrow shoulders because I know in a few more years he won't want me to sit on the couch with him and watch anything and he probably won't want me to touch him."
"Times have damn sure changed. And I can't lie. now i worry. I worry about if and when I'll ever find the right man, if I'll ever be able to exhale. The more I try not to think about it, the more I think about it. This morning, I was drinking a cup of coffee, when it occurred to me that my life is half over. Never in a million years would i have ever believed that I would be thirty-six years old and still childless and single. But here I am." - Savannah
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"Disappearing Acts is a strong story that reader wob't want to put down...Areader can melt in the heat of Zora and Franklin's passions about each other, their work, their families...McMillan has moded a moving winner." - Detroit Free Press
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"...any voice we we accomplish is really many voices, and the most powerful voices are always steeped in unutterable silences. A story is a formula for extracting meaning from chaos, a handful of water we scoop up to recall an ocean. Nothing really stands still for this reduction, this abstraction. We need readers who are willing to be co-conspirators..."
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Mama was originally a story, Ma' Dear, that I workshopped with my writing group, The Harlem Writer's Guild. It was inspired by events from my childhood and characters from Port Huron where I grew up. It is not an auto-biogrpaphy- fiction is running a few aspects of reality through the lens of a lie. The structure might be taken from past,a point of departure, a framework, but the details are all lifted right out of my imagination.
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