I couldn’t be more excited about <a href=” http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,20041807,00.html?cid=recirc-peopleRecirc //” target=”_blank”>this</a>.
(As much as I love the Tales of the City books – especially the later ones, especially SURE OF YOU, whose epigraph makes me cry –my favorite Maupin book is THE NIGHT LISTENER, one of the best books I’ve ever read about our need to know what’s true, and our willingness to reject that truth once we’ve established it. Actually, just one of the best novels, ever.)
I discovered Maupin in the mid-80s, in San Antonio’s Half-Price Books, a wonderful store that backed up to the wonderfully named Avenue B, which was the eastern border of the city’s Brackenridge Park. On a hot day — and San Antonio had no shortage of those — Half Price Books was a wonderful retreat, cool and musty smelling, full of discoveries. Of course I yearned to imitate Maupin — write a serial novel for a newspaper. A colleague and I even pitched the idea to our bosses. Thank god they said no. That’s one less embarrassment to live down.
Any other Maupin fans here?
Maria,
One day I’ll blog about my first trip to the original Taco Cabana. That stands out in my mind. Especially the part when my boyfriend said, “Whatever you order, it’s very important to have a bean-and-cheese.” He was right, the bean-and-cheese really grounded everything else.
It’s amazing to me how that night stands out in my mind, but much about that first visit to San Antonio is similarly vivid.
I was one of those people who read “Tales of The City” in the San Francisco Chronicle, every day. I liked the first batch the best and was very pleased with the television version of it, even if Mona didn’t look like she should. Laura Linney – first time I EVER saw her – was amazing as was Olympia Dukakis as Mrs. Madrigal.
As the series went on, though, well it never quite had the magic for me that the first one did.
I DO remember, very clearly, that a lesbian friend of mind clpped out Michael’s letter to his parents when he came out to them and framed it and hung it in her apartment. We all felt, I think, in a way that yes, that THAT was yep, how you do it, THAT is what you say, THAT is how it is.
I hae never made up my mind about THE NIGHT LISTENER. Does it make sense that part of me liked it and part of me felt very manipulated by it? I’m not sure I can articulate that any more – I forget too much about it – but I finished it feeling very odd.
A friend lent me the two omnibus volumes — 28 BARBARY LANE and BACK TO BARBARY LANE and I read them all, one right after another, on my daily bus-to-Metro commute from Alexandria to downtown Washington. They were big books and unwieldy to read if I was standing, but I was so enthralled that I got through both of them in about a week.
Can’t wait for this one.
I love his writing. I picked up THE NIGHT LISTENER because of what you wrote about it, but I think my mind was so blasted by sleep deprivation (this was during the first year of my boys’ lives) that I missed the part where the truth is established.
I’ve thought about it occasionally since then. To have made it all the way through a book under those circumstances and then missed the point is a little upsetting.
You might not have missed it Keith, I just might have set you up to expect something larger.
I’ll write more on this, but I want to check my memory against the book.
I have a vague memory of a short italicized passage that might have been the key.
But to quote SJ Rozan quoting the <i>Monk</i> theme:
I could be wrong now. BUT I DON’T THINK SO!
I haven’t read the books but I’m watching the DVD’s from Netflix with a friend who’s never seen them so we’re doing them a couple of episodes at a time. I saw the stories on PBS years ago and wanted to shae them with my friend.
Since I haven’t read the books I don’t have any preconceived notions about the characters as played by whatever actors. I think Olympia Dukakis is awesome as the landlady etc. (I do know what happens with er, her) and the rest of the cast is fine by me because I don’t have the mental images from reading them.
And of course it all takes place in my beloved San Francisco, geeeeez it’s great seeing those scenes of the city as i watch them here in Anchorage.
I just put The Night Listener on hold at the library. Thanks for the heads up.
LOVE Maupin.
I totally remember that Half Price books. I spent a GREAT many lovely hours there as a college student at Trinity.
You bring back many great memories, chica!
I haven’t read his work, but he will be speaking at the American Library Association annual meeting in DC in 2 weeks, taking the place of Elizabeth Edwards who had to cancel. Announcement here http://www.ala.org/ala/eventsandconferencesb/annual/2007a/specialevents.htm#edwards (Sorry I haven’t learned how to put live links)
Maupin! I just put his newest on hold at the library (budget, you know).
I so wanted to be part of Tales of the City. I had been out for quite a while but longed for a community like that one.
And I haunt all the Half Price locations here.
Thanks for reminding us.
Andi,
It seems to me that your reaction to THE NIGHT LISTENER is exactly what happens to the the Night Listener himself. He’s been manipulated, clearly, but — on some level, he enjoyed it, enabled it, needed it.
My memory was that there was a single passage that crystallized the book for me, but in looking back, I find that it’s a little less direct than thaT. (Telling point: One chapter toward the end is called “No Epiphanies.”
I’m going to go hunting on the Internet, find the real-life story that inspired this book, and I’ll post it in a new entry for those who want to read it. But here I’ll say
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That it strikes me as a particularly modern story, for while the two characters in The Night Listener come to love one another while speaking over the phone, who among us hasn’t had the experience, via e-mail, of rushing into an ill-advised intimacy with another person. (Okay, maybe quite a few haven’t done that.) But even if you come to regret the secrets you shared, the weaknesses you showed, etc., do you regret the act itself? I do, I did. But Maupin’s main character, having been lied to (as Maupin certainly was in real life) finds something . . . useful in the lie, perhaps beautiful. All the “facts” around the friendship are in dispute, but does that mean the relationship is meaningless? It is, in the end, a very open-hearted and open-ended book about liars, something I could never write, because I have such a violent, knee-jerk reaction to lying.
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Yee gawds, <i>how</i> many years has it been since I first read the Tales? I think it was about two years after <i>Babycakes</i> came out, so that would have been . . . 1986 (I had to go look it up). I read the first four books in one huge gulp which, in retrospect, was a mistake because by the time I GOT to <i>Babycakes</i>, I was overloaded and not ready for the intense grotesquerie of what happens to the Rev. Jim Jones character. I had to put ‘em down and walk away for several years, but eventually I came back and realized (again) that this was a twentieth-century <i>Pickwick</i>, published in the parts in the nineteenth-century tradition.
I completely agree about <i>Sure of You</i>; there are parts that are heart-wrenching, and I still can’t help wincing a bit when I run across the epigraph, reading <i>The House at Pooh Corner</i> to my daughter.
(And in a “life imitates art–sorta”, one of my very close hanging-out buddies these days is a TS woman.)