Armistead Maupin

After suffering personal calamities in New York, Mary Ann Singleton moves back to San Francisco after being gone for twenty years and begins to slowly rebuild her life, only to confront fresh terrors when her past comes back to haunt her.

Reflecting on the profound impact those closest to him have had on his life, Maupin shares his candid search for his "logical family," the people he could call his own. "Sooner or later, we have to venture beyond our biological family to find our logical one, the one that actually makes sense for us," he writes. "We have to, if we are to live without squandering our lives." From his loving relationship with his palm-reading Grannie who insisted Maupin...

San Francisco, 28 Barbary Lane, Anna Madrigal runs a boarding house. She wel-comes people who have nowhere else to go: the misfits. This matriarch is known for her unending kindness and her superb marijuana crop. The novel starts with the arrival of Mary Ann Singleton, a prudish, naïve, young woman who escaped her dull Ohio hometown for San Francisco. She settles in with her other fellow tenants: Michael "Mouse," a personable young gay man, Brian...

In the midst of his crumbling relationship, a radio show host begins speaking to his biggest fan, a young boy, via the telephone. But when questions of the boy's identity comes up, the host's life is thrown into chaos.

San Francisco is the hippest city in America, and right in the middle of it are the residents of 28 Barbary Lane. In the early 80's, San Francisco was a sunny, comfortable place where everyone smiled most of the time, possibly because sex was rarely further than a wink and a nod away, as this installment of the series makes clear. The various inhabitants of Mrs. Madrigal's building are living the San Francisco high life to the fullest as unusual...

Jennifer Kroot's documentary about the creator of Tales of the city moves nimbly between playful and poignant and laugh-out-loud funny. Maupin offers a disarmingly frank look at the journey that took him from the jungles of Vietnam to the bathhouses of '70's San Francisco to the front line of the American culture war.