Her heroine, Viola Price, was dealing with failing health and grown kids with problems.īut in 2011, McMillan told Oprah Winfrey about a decision she'd made. She was hurt and angry for a time, and some felt that came though in her 2002 book, A Day Late and a Dollar Short. Like Stella, McMillan found love on vacation - but her happy ending fell apart when her young husband told her he was gay.

McMillan insists her books don't mirror her life, but in the beginning, Stella sort of did. Women loved the May-December romance with a happy ending. The movie version of Stella was also a blockbuster. The story centered on Stella Payne, a driven stockbroker who found love with a much younger man while on a Jamaican vacation. McMillan believes her readers will identify with the urge to re-examine their lives past the halfway mark, since most of them have been fans for more than two decades.įor a lot of them, that journey began with her third novel, Waiting to Exhale, a 1992 publishing phenomenon that told the story of four friends in their mid-30s trying to figure out life.Įxhale was on the New York Times best-seller list for more than nine months, and was followed with another best-seller, How Stella Got Her Groove Back. So, McMillan says, after getting a reminder that long life isn't a given, Georgia decides to shake things up and prepares for her future by revisiting her past relationships. Her lucrative career has never excited her and her love life has been on pause for years. But for a lot of people, it feels like settling - and they know it.' 'You live in your little boring house, and you realize that every day you just do the same thing. 'You do all that and then so what?' McMillan says. But, McMillan says, Georgia's accumulation of fine things has left her wondering why she bothered. Georgia is attractive, successful and economically secure. Her protagonist, Georgia Young, is an optometrist. So it's not surprising that her latest book - I Almost Forgot About You - is about middle age.

Terry McMillan's characters have grown along with her.

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I almost forgot about you