The Interruption of Everything by Terry McMillan

First published: 2005

Type of work: Novel

Type of plot: Domestic realism

Time of work: 2004

Locale: Oakland, California

Principal Characters:

• Marilyn Grimes, a forty-four-year-old African American woman confronting a series of life changes
• Leon Grimes, Marilyn’s husband, who also faces serious life changes
• Arthurine Grimes, Marilyn’s live-in mother-in-law and an important ally
• Paulette, one of Marilyn’s best friends, who is blissfully married for the second time
• Bunny, Marilyn’s other best friend, who has never married

The Novel

Like most of Terry McMillan’s novels, The Interruption of Everything is focused on a woman’s attempt to manage successfully her domestic and romantic relationships. Narrated from a first-person point of view, the novel is written in a conversational tone that invites readers to enter into the private world of a middle-class African American woman in the twenty-first century. The novel’s central tension arises from Marilyn’s realization that, in focusing so closely on the care and nurturing of her family, she has neglected to give herself the same quality of attention.

When The Interruption of Everything opens, Marilyn is hiding in a bathroom stall at work, taking stock of her life, and trying to prepare for the reality of menopause. While she is hiding, she inadvertently overhears one of her coworkers discussing with another the infidelity of the worker’s husband. Readers are thus plunged from the outset into the social reality of many middle-aged women. Unbeknown to Marilyn, she, too, is about to become familiar with this particular social experience, as she will shortly discover that her husband, Leon, has also had an extramarital affair. In addition, Marilyn soon discovers that she is not only menopausal but also pregnant.

In the midst of the upheaval caused by this discovery, one of Marilyn’s sons comes home from college to visit, her adult daughter announces her own pregnancy and imminent move to London, and her drug-addicted sister calls to let Marilyn know that their mother seems to be suffering from dementia. The ritual “Private Pity Parties” in which Marilyn and her girlfriends Paulette and Bunny indulge on a monthly basis are an insufficient antidote to this deluge of events, and Marilyn must find a way to take serious stock of her life.

Marilyn kicks Leon out, sneaks away to a hotel for a weekend alone, changes her hairstyle, and fantasizes a reunion with her former husband, Gordon. All these courses of action fail to yield a resolution, and she realizes that she has been seeking the wrong resolution: Marilyn has been looking for a way to sever connections and distance herself from her family, but she finally recognizes that she cherishes these connections and has responsibilities as a mother, daughter, wife, and aunt that she cannot shirk. She also realizes that she has responsibilities to herself that require her to go back to school to pursue an M.F.A. and to communicate her needs and desires to her husband. The novel ends with Marilyn putting both of those plans into action.

The Characters

While Marilyn believes that her only role is as an emotional provider, McMillan constructs a nexus of characters in such a way that it becomes obvious that Marilyn enjoys the support of a large and varied female community across generational and class strata. In doing so, McMillan reveals Marilyn’s major flaw: an unwillingness to deal truthfully with herself and to expend the same best effort on her own behalf that she has expended for her family. Foremost in this supportive community is Marilyn’s mother-in-law, Arthurine. Though she is a source of much annoyance for Marilyn and a good deal of comic dialogue for readers, Arthurine is ultimately one of Marilyn’s greatest supporters. When the widowed Arthurine embarks on a late-life romance, she provides for Marilyn an example of how to pursue one’s own physical and emotional desires in the face of opposition. She is also instrumental in helping her son, Marilyn’s husband, recognize the ways in which his selfish behavior has harmed Marilyn in particular and the Grimes family as a whole.

Marilyn’s friends Paulette and Bunny are also invaluable sources of support for Marilyn. They combine unwavering support for Marilyn during her emotional distress with sometimes brutal honesty. Paulette’s hot and heavy romance with her second husband at once belies the myth of one true love and demonstrates the resilience of the heart. Bunny’s refusal to commit exemplifies the possibility of contentment without partnering.

Although Marilyn’s experience is solidly rooted in the middle class, it is not an insular experience, and working-class characters such as her sister, Joy, and the twin sisters Orange and Blue who braid her hair are instrumental in helping Marilyn identify her own fears and failures. The novel’s clear-eyed treatment of these characters neither romanticizes them nor dismisses their perspectives. In this way, it seeks to demonstrate the value of a rich and varied community.

This valorization of community crosses lines of gender as well as age and class and may be seen in the characterization of Marilyn’s husband. Initially, it is easy to read Leon as a cipher for male middle-age crisis, and in fact a number of the female characters, intimates of Marilyn as well as strangers, assess him as such. However, the self-reflection and communication of emotion of which he ultimately proves capable invest him with a great deal of humanity and allows for an unequivocally happy ending—something remarkable in McMillan’s work.

Critical Context

Like many novels by African American women aimed at a mass market, The Interruption of Everything has received little attention from academic critics. On the other hand, reviewers from the mass media have generally praised the novel’s consistency with McMillan’s oeuvre, the earlier works of which were instrumental in pioneering the genre known as “chick lit.” The popular success of McMillan’s fiction, though, has been both a boon and burden. While her work has sold well and her success has, possibly, made publication easier for other women, especially African Americans, her work has not been taken very seriously among critics of African American literature. This is in part because her novels relegate to the background those racial issues traditionally seen as proper to African American literature. Recent criticism, however, has begun to acknowledge the extent to which the central themes of community and the social roles of women link McMillan’s fiction to the work of those African American women writers who are perceived as more serious or literary. The questions raised in The Interruption of Everything regarding the extent to which a mother should sacrifice herself, and particularly her possibilities for creative expression, are consistent with the work of such African American women writers as Dorothy West (The Living Is Easy), Alice Walker (Meridian), and Tina Ansa (Ugly Ways).

Bibliography

Campbell, Bebe Moore. “Black Books Are Good for Business.” In Defining Ourselves: Black Writers in the ’90’s, edited by Elizabeth Nunez and Brenda M. Greene. New York: Peter Lang, 1999. Campbell’s essay, like the others collected in this book, was originally presented at the Fourth Annual National Black Writers Conference. In it, she discusses the important role of black women writers in dispelling the myth that black people don’t read or buy books. She also describes the multiple ways in which race can operate in black fiction.

Ellerby, Janet. “Deposing the Man of the House: Terry McMillan Rewrites the Family.” MELUS 22, no. 2 (Summer, 1997): 105-117. Argues that McMillan’s representations of family disrupt a patriarchal discourse of family values and expose the figure of the black matriarch as myth.

Guerrero, Lisa. “’Sistah’s Are Doin’ It for Themselves’: Chick Lit in Black and White.” In Chick Lit: The New Woman’s Fiction, edited by Suzanne Ferris and Mallory Young. New York: Routledge, 2006. Identifies crucial differences in the chick lit genre as practiced by black women and white women by comparing McMillan’s Waiting to Exhale (1992) with Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary (1996).

Richards, Paulette. Terry McMillan: A Critical Companion. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999. Situates McMillan’s work in the larger African American tradition and offers formal and thematic analyses of the author’s first four novels.

Walker, Alice. “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens.” In In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983. Outlines the difficulties black women artists often face and acknowledges the courage women show in nurturing their artistry.