Surviving in spite of yourself and the world’s roadblocks

Just finished Terry McMillan’s first published novel, Mama (1987). Jail, cocaine, high school dropouts, unwed pregnancies, poverty, alcoholism, drug addiction, arrests, violence, abuse, single parent households, bad checks; what life-robbers some of those words are. How can anyone get beyond having all of those things in one family? That one family lives in a place where almost everyone around them is in the same boat. In this novel, children are born into families where young parents party, drink, and have knock down drag out bloody fights a room away from their kids, listening and cowering in the dark behind closed bedroom doors. It doesn’t sound like the subject matter for a book anyone could endure, much less enjoy. The book is like an epic prose poem on surviving in spite of yourself, and in spite of a world around you that throws up roadblocks faster than dirt flies beneath a hound searching for a buried bone.

Terry McMillan breathes such life into her characters, when they inhale, you are pulled right into the story, as if you were sitting on the living room flowered couch, smelling beans cooking on the stove, and catching up on the latest family drama. The excerpt below is an example of McMillan’s humor: 

“Mama had another stroke this morning. Her pressure been going up. They say there was a weak spot in her brain in the walls of her arteries and it swelled up like a bubble and busted. We had to rush her to the hospital.”
“You say Curly had a bubble bust? She in the hospital?” The words were like a faint echo coming from the back of her throat.
“Aunt Mildred, I can’t hear you.”
“I didn’t say nothing.” Mildred said each word slowly, then louder and deliberately. “What hospital she in?”
“Mercy.”
“That’s what she goin’ need.”

Terry McMillan is as strong as her protagonists, and does not rely on the kindness of strangers for her success. At the tender age of 36 she was less than satisfied with the promotion of this, her first book, so she became a marketing department of one, sending out thousands of letters to booksellers. The first run of 5,000 books soon sold out. The rest is history. Be like Terry McMillan.