Terms of Endearment was published by Simon & Schuster in 1975, marking McMurtry’s decisive turn from the rural Texas of his early novels to the urban Texas — specifically Houston — that would dominate his middle period. Aurora Greenway is a widow in her late forties, beautiful, imperious, manipulative, and irresistible. She lives in a River Oaks house that is gradually falling apart, drives a Lincoln Continental, and manages a rotating cast of suitors with the skill of a general deploying troops. Her daughter Emma has married Flap Horton, a mild English instructor, and moved to Iowa, then Nebraska, then back to Texas, accumulating three children, mounting debts, and the quiet realization that her marriage, while not terrible, is not what she hoped for.
The novel’s first two-thirds are comedy — sharp, warm, frequently hilarious. Aurora fends off her suitors (a retired general, an oilman, a banker, an unlikely assortment of Houston’s male establishment) while conducting long, combative phone calls with Emma. McMurtry writes dialogue with the assurance of a playwright, and Aurora’s conversations — self-dramatizing, withering, unexpectedly tender — are among the finest comic set pieces in American fiction.
The novel’s final third turns, without warning, from comedy to tragedy. Emma is diagnosed with cancer. Her decline and death are rendered with a plainness that makes them almost unbearable. McMurtry does not melodramatize — he simply shows Emma dealing with the logistics of dying: who will raise the children, what to say to friends, how to manage the simultaneous kindness and obtuseness of the people around her. Aurora, who has spent the entire novel controlling everyone, discovers that she cannot control this.
The Film
James L. Brooks’s 1983 adaptation won five Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress (Shirley MacLaine as Aurora), Best Supporting Actor (Jack Nicholson as Garrett Breedlove, a character expanded from the novel’s astronaut neighbor), and Best Adapted Screenplay. The film is excellent but inevitably simplifies McMurtry’s novel — Aurora’s suitors are reduced, the Houston setting is less vivid, and Nicholson’s star turn, while magnificent, shifts the story’s balance toward romance and away from the mother-daughter relationship that is the novel’s spine.
Debra Winger’s performance as Emma is the film’s emotional anchor, and her death scene remains one of the most affecting in American cinema.
McMurtry’s Urban Turn
Terms of Endearment was a deliberate provocation. McMurtry had grown tired of being classified as a “Western writer” and wanted to demonstrate that Texas contained more than cowboys and ranches. Houston — booming, ugly, sprawling, car-dependent, culturally ambitious but aesthetically chaotic — is the anti-Thalia: a place of too much rather than too little. Aurora’s world of luncheons, art galleries, and cocktail parties is as authentically Texan as Homer Bannon’s cattle ranch, and McMurtry makes no effort to glamorize either.
Collecting Terms of Endearment
First edition (Simon & Schuster, New York, 1975): Cloth binding. Dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $150–$400
- Very good/very good: $50–$150
- Signed: $300–$700