NPR's Book of the Day Revisiting ‘Waiting to Exhale’
Dec 20, 2025
Brittany Luse, host of It's Been a Minute, shares insights on Terry McMillan's Waiting to Exhale and its impact on '90s Black professional women's culture. Tia Williams, a romance author, discusses how McMillan shaped her writing career and the broader landscape of contemporary Black women's fiction. They explore themes of friendship, dating challenges of the era, and the book's nostalgia amidst the influence on media like Sex and the City. Both guests celebrate the novel as a timeless reflection of its time while urging a new generation to revisit its pages.
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A New Black Middle-Class Interior
- Waiting to Exhale introduced mainstream interior lives of middle-class Black women in the 1990s.
- That specificity made the book both culturally catalytic and widely relatable.
Childhood Memories Around The Book
- B.A. Parker remembers the book's paperback cover on her mom's shelf growing up and the film and soundtrack as part of her childhood.
- Brittany Luse recalls sneaking reads of adult books like this as a child and hearing the adult conversations it captured.
Authorial Independence Against Backlash
- McMillan refused to let the African-American community dictate how she told her story and emphasized she's not representing the entire race.
- That stance preempted predictable intracommunity backlash about perceived harms to Black men.