McMillan's first book, Mama, was published in 1987.[2] Unsatisfied with her publisher's limited promotion of Mama, McMillan promoted her own debut novel by writing to thousands of booksellers, particularly African-American bookstores, and the book soon sold out of its initial first hardcover printing of 5,000 copies.[3]
McMillan achieved national attention in 1992 with her third novel, Waiting to Exhale. At the time, it was the second largest paperback book deal in publishing history.[4] The book remained on The New York Timesbestseller list for many months and by 1995 it had sold more than three million copies. The novel contributed to a shift in Black popular cultural consciousness and the visibility of a female Black middle-class identity in popular culture. McMillan was credited with having introduced the interior world of Black women professionals in their thirties who are successful, alone, available, and unhappy.[5] In 1995, the novel was adapted into a film of the same title, directed by Forest Whitaker and starring Whitney Houston, Angela Bassett, Loretta Devine, and Lela Rochon.
Waiting to Exhale played an instrumental part in promoting a more honest, reflective representation of contemporary black womanhood and played an instrumental role in creating a dialogue in R&B music that was relatable to black women. Her book discussed the everyday needs as well as the sexual desires and pleasures of women that had largely been missing to that point. Daphne A. Brooks argues in her piece "Its not right but its okay" that McMillan's work informed and influenced the woman-centered R&B movement that has become very popular today. In today's R&B, artists such as SZA, Summer Walker, Jazmine Sullivan, among many others, articulate the experiences of black women, a trend that was jumpstarted by the work of McMillan and the R&B artists who innovated the genre.[7]
Nishikawa, Kinohi. "Romance Novel." Hans Ostrom and J. David Macey Jr. (eds), The Greenwood Encyclopedia of African American Literature. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2005. pp. 1411–15.