"I'm more interested in interpersonal relationships - between lovers families, siblings. That's why I write about how we treat each other"
About this Quote
McMillan plants her flag in the supposedly "small" stuff: lovers arguing in kitchens, sisters keeping score, families tightening around old wounds. The move is strategic. In a culture that treats power as something exercised in boardrooms or on battlefields, she insists the real governance happens in living rooms and bedrooms, where people learn what they can ask for, what they must swallow, and what they deserve. "Interpersonal relationships" sounds almost clinical, but she immediately translates it into the intimate roster - lovers, families, siblings - the roles where identity gets negotiated daily.
The subtext is a refusal of distance. McMillan isn't interested in characters as symbols or social problems; she's interested in how they behave when love and obligation collide. That "how we treat each other" line is doing a lot of work: it's moral language without sermonizing, a way to frame relationship drama as ethics. Not "how we feel", not "what we want", but treatment - the choices, the patterns, the harm that can be justified as habit.
Context matters, too. As a major voice in contemporary African American women's fiction, McMillan wrote into an era when Black interior lives were often flattened into stereotype or relegated to side plots. Her focus on romance, marriage, friendship, and family doesn't retreat from politics; it locates politics where it actually lands. The result is fiction that reads with the urgency of gossip and the stakes of testimony: what happens between people isn't just personal, it's the blueprint for everything else.
The subtext is a refusal of distance. McMillan isn't interested in characters as symbols or social problems; she's interested in how they behave when love and obligation collide. That "how we treat each other" line is doing a lot of work: it's moral language without sermonizing, a way to frame relationship drama as ethics. Not "how we feel", not "what we want", but treatment - the choices, the patterns, the harm that can be justified as habit.
Context matters, too. As a major voice in contemporary African American women's fiction, McMillan wrote into an era when Black interior lives were often flattened into stereotype or relegated to side plots. Her focus on romance, marriage, friendship, and family doesn't retreat from politics; it locates politics where it actually lands. The result is fiction that reads with the urgency of gossip and the stakes of testimony: what happens between people isn't just personal, it's the blueprint for everything else.
Quote Details
| Topic | Relationship |
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