Waiting to Exhale by Terry McMillan
Penguin Group Publications 1992
LJ’s Rating *** Beyond Good
More than a breath away…
Waiting to Exhale, Terry McMillan’s novel, keenly and accurately portrays contemporary African-American male/female love relationships strictly from a woman’ point of view. The story involves four heroines who are alternately in love, out of love, in between love or waiting for love to happen.
As the title suggests, these intelligent professional 30-something women of the 90s are all “waiting to exhale,” i.e., waiting for that special man to sweep them off their feet and cause them to breathe easy.
Savannah Jackson is a beautiful, intelligent woman with a promising career. However, no matter how many promotions she earns at work, her meddling mother and sister simply will not allow her to live down the fact that she’s still unmarried, at 36 years of age.
With 11 years of marriage under her belt, Bernadine Harris is living in the lap of luxury along with a husband, two children, and all of her material needs fulfilled. One morning out of blue her husband John quietly and calmly announces that he’s leaving her, for his 24-year-old white bookkeeper.
Robin Stokes, young, slim and pretty, is highly successful at her profession — underwriting for a major insurance company. Her love life, on the other hand, is a train wreck. She’s just wasted 2 years of her life babysitting a philandering, commitment-shy grown man.
Gloria Matthews is a heavyset attractive woman who operates one of the few African-American owned beauty salons in Phoenix, Arizona. She’s also the single mom parent to a 16-year-old boy named Tarik. Gloria’s adult life revolves around the church, her salon, food, and Tarik, not necessarily in that order. The one and only love of her life and father to her son finally admits to her why he’s been avoiding her sexual advances all of these years — he’s gay…
Waiting to Exhale earns *** stars from me, LJ, for Beyond Good. It covers the spectrum of contemporary love relationships in that it deals with single relationships, interracial relationships, divorce, infidelity, homosexuality, and promiscuity. Although the story offers very little in the way of real solutions to the dilemmas it presents, the camaraderie amongst these women will delight modern African-American female readers who may be looking for some sort of confirmation to the dating challenges they face in the modern world.