December 14 at 4 am et/pt.

Terry McMillan is one of those inspiring women who followed her calling and found fame, fortune and love along the way. Undeterred by setbacks such as poverty, addiction, heartbreak and grief, she is pursuing her dream of writing true-to-life stories that real women can relate to.

McMillan grew up in a run-down industrial town in Michigan. The eldest of five kids, she played mother to her younger siblings, especially after her father, an unemployed laborer, left the family and her mother took a night-shift factory job to help the family make ends meet.

Her life was tough, which was perhaps part of the reason McMillan always felt that she wasn't meant for small-town living. Her feelings of restlessness were magnified by the lives she glimpsed on TV and the novels she discovered while shelving books at the local library, a job that paid $1.25 an hour. McMillan began planning her escape, and she took a mind-numbing job as a key punch operator to save money. A top student, she graduated from high school at age 17 and was offered a scholarship to a local community college. Much to her mother's dismay, McMillan turned down the offer, opting instead to move to Los Angeles with $322 in savings.

Once in California, McMillan took a secretarial job and enrolled in evening classes at a Los Angeles city college. Worried about the stories she heard about her friends back home getting pregnant and using drugs, the young woman convinced her mother to relocate their family to her newly adopted home; soon, the entire McMillan clan was living in Terry's one-bedroom apartment. In 1974, six years after moving to L.A., McMillan won a scholarship to attend the University of California in Berkeley. There, she majored in journalism and wrote editorials for the school newspaper. With the encouragement of a creative writing teacher, she also published her first piece (a short story) in a literary journal. It was official: McMillan was hooked on writing.

McMillan's life was on the upswing until September 1993; while McMillan was on a book tour in England, her mother died abruptly from an asthma attack. McMillan sunk into a deep funk, unable to work for two years. In the spring of 1995, in an effort to lift her spirits, McMillan took a trip to Jamaica. She brought back more than a tan from the sunny vacation — she met the love of her life, Jonathan Plummer, a man nearly half her age. Their love affair inspired McMillan's follow-up best-seller, "How Stella Got Her Groove Back," which took her less than a month to complete. In 1998, the happy couple tied the knot in Maui.

These days, McMillan makes her home in California, where she continues to write, entertain friends and family, and spend time with her loving husband and son. She recently published her newest novel, "A Day Late and a Dollar Short," a book she began writing before the death of her mother.