Black women in their 30s: Then vs. Now
It's Been a Minute
NPR
4.6 • 8.8K Ratings
🗓️ 19 January 2026
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This episode comes from NPR's Books We've Loved podcast series. Brittany joined hosts Andrew Limbong and B.A. Parker to revisit Terry McMillan's classic novel, Waiting to Exhale. The three get into how the book was a blueprint for Sex & The City and how it depicts the complexity of Black women's lives - and echoes the lives of Black women today.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, hello. I'm Brittany Luce and you're listening to It's Been a Minute from NPR, a show about what's going on in culture and why it doesn't happen by accident. |
| 0:18.7 | 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. |
| 0:24.4 | And now they are not quite the same as the conversations that I have with my friends, but some aspects of them still feel true in ways. |
| 0:32.7 | You're listening to Books We've Load from NPR. |
| 0:35.3 | 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. 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 that Terry McMillan's Waiting to Exhale. |
| 0:59.0 | Woo. |
| 1:00.1 | I'm starting doing the applause. |
| 1:02.4 | Sheep, sheep, shoot, they do. |
| 1:03.8 | It's a pretty big book. It's a pretty, it's a pretty icon. |
| 1:07.3 | I don't want to overuse the word iconic, but I think it's fair here. |
| 1:10.5 | Totally fair. In my house, it's iconic. Yeah, I was like, all right? Before we get to that, |
| 1:17.6 | I'm just going to do a quick synopsis for anybody who hasn't read it. This book follows four |
| 1:21.2 | friends. We got Savannah, Bernardine, Robin, Gloria. They're all in their mid-30s. They're all |
| 1:27.0 | 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 out, 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 |
| 1:44.9 | between the four of them. |
| 1:46.0 | I think that's a fair enough to start. |
| 1:47.3 | That's a fair enough place to start. |
| 1:49.0 | Parker, you said you grew up with this book? |
| 1:50.5 | Yes. |
| 1:51.0 | It was the cover that you have, the old school paperback with the highlighter business suits |
| 1:59.3 | with the fancy hats. |
| 2:00.9 | I sought every day of my childhood of my mom's book show. |
... |
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