Chatting with Terry

NEW YORK - Hanging out with author Terry McMillan is like chillin' with your worldly, slightly acerbic, super-chatty aunt.

In the 1990s, she ushered in the era of black women's chick lit with her New York Times best-selling novel-turned-movie, Waiting to Exhale. The latest of the 61-year-old McMillan's eight tomes, Who Asked You?, was released Tuesday, launching her first book tour in three years.

It will bring her Thursday night to the Free Library of Philadelphia, where she will join Jesmyn Ward, winner of the 2011 National Book Award for Salvage the Bones. "Now, she can write," McMillan says of Ward.

Then, like that older, reproving relative, she moves her head slowly back and forth. She laments the lack of a significant following for Ward, among other contemporary African American female writers.

"I talked [Ward] up on Twitter," she says. "I always tweet other writers like Dolen Perkins-Valdez. You know her? She wrote Wench. She's my girl."

Building time into her schedule to visit family and friends who live in New York, McMillan arrived there late last Thursday night from her Los Angeles home. By the next afternoon, her ears are still clogged from the five-hour flight. She sits at a desk in a corner room in the W Hotel in Union Square. Her laptop and iPhone buzz.

She has given herself some breathing room in this 15-city tour. For example, when the shoe-holic McMillan is in Philadelphia, she plans to visit the Joan Shepp Boutique. Is saleswoman Tuesday Gordon still there, she asks? Eight years ago, she bought her first pair of Christian Louboutin pumps with Gordon's guidance.

On McMillan's feet now are orange patent leather loafers. Her hair is a halo of loose twists in a bold, if odd, cross between eggplant and claret. She colors it herself.

"Can't you tell?" McMillan asks, laughing.

She's been busy living her life, and ruffling some feathers, the last three years. Learning. Growing. Going on Oprah.

A prolific tweeter since 2009 - her handle is @MsTerryMcMillan - she has gotten herself into some piping-hot water with her social media commentaries. She has taken jabs at Mexicans, and threatened to smack former Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin. She called Will and Jada Pinkett Smith's children, Willow and Jaden, "pimped and exploited."

"That's when I realized how effective Twitter was," she said. "I saw references to that online yesterday, and that was 2011."

With more than 226,000 followers and about a dozen posts a day, she has embraced Twitter as her own personal soliloquy.

In quiet moments, McMillan thinks about the late Whitney Houston. The singer signed on to reprise her role as Savannah in the big-screen version of Getting to Happy, the sequel to Exhale, before her death in 2012.

"It was tough," McMillan said. "We just turned in another draft of the script, then two weeks later, Whitney passed away. Then two weeks later, the president of the movie studio said it would be best to do the story without Savannah. 'Whitney was so iconic, she couldn't be replaced,' he said.

"I disagreed. . . . I went a little berserk explaining to them why. That was a fresh wound, and to make a sudden decision under those circumstances . . . Savannah was the catalyst, and I couldn't imagine the story without her."

No word yet on the movie.

In 2010, McMillan made a much-talked-about appearance on Oprah, during which she said she had forgiven - yes, forgiven - ex-husband Jonathan Plummer for coming out as gay in 2005. His admission ended the couple's seven-year marriage. The next year, Winfrey built an Oprah's Lifeclass, on the power to forgive, around that episode; it remains in the rotation.

"No one was more surprised than I was," McMillan said about her softened heart. "I had been a balloon that was just too full, and the air came out, and it was wonderful, and I realized I didn't hate."

(As for a special someone, she says she hasn't met him yet, just "creepy crawlers.")

Forgiveness is the linchpin of Who Asked You? (Viking, $27.95).

The 385-page novel, set in Los Angeles in 2001, is about matriarch Betty Jean and the very opinionated people in her life.

Betty Jean is well into her 50s and the primary caretaker of her bedridden husband, who suffers from dementia. At the same time, she finds herself the guardian of two grandsons. (No, McMillan says, this story is not autobiographical. She's not a grandmother, yet.)

The folks who populate Betty Jean's world are a trip. McMillan writes them saucy. The trying sisters, the trifling sons, the nurse who takes care of her husband, the social worker who is supposed to "help" her - all are judgmental, to the point of being mean.

Still, the characters manage to deal with the social issues of the day, from mixed marriage and biracial children (Tammy, Betty Jean's best friend, is McMillan's first solidly developed white character) to gang violence and bullying. McMillan tackles recidivism, and the election of the first African American president.

"In real life, a lot of people are super-critical, but they don't look at their own behavior," McMillan said.

But then she added: "Sometimes people who criticize you are there to stop you from doing yourself in. If you can understand that, you see it as love. And if you understand that, you will soften, and in that softness lies forgiveness."

Terry McMillan: "Who Asked You?" and Jesmyn Ward: "Salvage the Bones"

7 p.m. Thursday at the Central Library, 1901 Vine St.

Tickets: $15, $7 students.

Information: 215-686-5322 or www.freelibrary.org EndText