Revisiting ‘Waiting to Exhale’
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It felt like a full circle moment to be like, oh my God, these are the conversations I was always trying to like ear hustle on. And now they are not quite the same as the conversations that I had with my friends, but some aspects of them still feel true in ways. You're listening to Books We've Loved from NPR. The book show where we reread old favorites and tell you why they still matter today. I'm Andrew Limbaugh. And I'm B.A. Parker. Parker, we did it. We did it. We did it.
We did it, Joe.
We've arrived. We've arrived at the end. We made it to the end of the season. Can you stand it? I haven't read this much since, like, college. I'm like, oh, well, let me. We did a full course load. This has been so fun, Andrew. Yeah, yeah. And in a lot of ways, the book we're about to talk about today is a culmination of a lot of the stuff we've been talking about.
For sure.
Yeah, which we'll get to in a bit. But first, I want to introduce our guest with us. We've got It's Been a Minute host, Brittany Luce. Brittany, what's up? How you doing? I'm happy to be here today. I'm excited about this conversation. All right. We won't tease it anymore. The book we are going to be talking about today is Terry McMillan's Waiting to Exhale. I'm doing the applause. It's a pretty big book. It's a pretty iconic. I don't want to overuse the word iconic, but I think it's fair here. Totally fair. In my house, it's iconic. All right. Before we get to that, I'm just going to do a quick synopsis for anybody who hasn't read it. This book follows four friends. We got Savannah, Bernadine, Robin, Gloria.
They're all in their mid thirties. They're all a mess in some way. And they're all like looking for love. Each of them have their ups and downs with men, which for listeners out there, just a heads up, we will be talking about sex in this conversation. But at the end of the day, I don't think it's a spoiler to say that what's at the core of this book is the friendship between the four of them. I think that's a fair enough to start. That's a fair enough place to start. Yeah. Parker, you said you grew up with this book? Yes. It was the cover that you have, the old school paperback with the highlighter business suits with the fancy hats. I saw it every day of my childhood on my mom's bookshelf. I mean, from that to the movie to the soundtrack, like my entire childhood.
Mm-hmm. is like wrapped up in waiting to exhale. Even though I've never read the book until today for the show. I'm sorry. I mean, I read this book when I was, like, 12. I had to sneak and read things, and it was too hard. I did sneak and read How Stella Got Her Groove Back, but Wait Until I Exhale, I couldn't. It was, like, too high on the shelf. A little bit. Yeah, you read it at 12? 12's crazy. Yeah, I mean, like, I couldn't follow or didn't care about a lot of the details that were in the book.
What themes does 'Waiting to Exhale' explore?
Marriage, divorce, husband, those things were not very relevant to my daily life. So far away. But it felt like the epitome of grown folks business. But waiting to exhale, I mean, Parker's absolutely right. It's like it is a foundational text for Black American women. And for women our age, this is like the backdrop of your childhood, essentially. Whether you've seen the movie or read the book or not, they're inescapable. Just for reference, it was in the background of my life. It was like, yeah. I also assumed it was grown folks' business. And that was like, I never bothered to read it until now. Because when I was a kid, I was like, oh, yeah, that's not for me. That's like something beyond. You mean the movie about all the black women living in Arizona in their 30s was not for you?
Well, I was like, okay, I'll get there when I get there. That's fair. Yeah, but it's hard to disentangle this book from the movie, right?
Yeah.
I think about, kind of similar to Amy Tan's Joy at Love Club, I do feel like I read this book through osmosis of seeing the trailer for the movie somehow. I sort of got the vibe of what it was about without ever having touched it. So, Brittany, being the only one who read this then and reading it now, did you feel like you grew up into the book?
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