Terry McMillan is an American novelist. Born in Port Huron, Michigan, McMillan has a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of California, Berkeley, and an MFA in film from Columbia University. McMillan’s first novel, Mama, was published in 1988. Due to limited promotion by the publisher, McMillan promoted her own novel by writing to Black-owned booksellers, resulting in the book selling out its first run of 5,000 hardcover copies.

Waiting to Exhale is McMillan’s third novel. Published in 1992, it spent several months on the New York Times bestseller list and sold more than three million copies by 1995. Waiting to Exhale is credited as being the first novel to showcase the professional and romantic lives of middle-class Black women. The novel also indirectly influenced the R&B genre, as the film adaptation’s soundtrack, produced by Babyface, created a platform for female R&B artists to create a dialogue via music regarding the experiences of modern Black women (Younger, Brianna. “Shocking Omissions: ‘Waiting to Exhale: Original Soundtrack Album’,” NPR, 13 Sept. 2017).

McMillan published another bestseller, How Stella Got Her Groove Back, in 1996, which was also adapted into a major film in 1998. She has since written many other novels, including a sequel to Waiting to Exhale called Getting to Happy, published in 2010.