Tales of the City!

I decided out of the blue to read Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City series a few weeks ago. I was looking for something funny and a little bit lighter to read, and these six books seemed to fit the bill perfectly.

Little did I know I'd become totally engrossed in the characters' lives. I lapped these books up so quickly I experienced withdrawal symptoms when I had to take a break from reading them for some reason or another.

Originally serialized in the San Francisco Chronicle, the series spans 10 years in the 1970s and 1980s in San Francisco, spanning the time from when casual sex and drug use was acceptable to the mid-1980s, when AIDS was beginning to change the San Francisco landscape drastically for gay and straight residents alike.

The series follows a cast of lovable San Franciscans living at the apartments at 28 Barbary Lane in the Russian Hill neighborhood: Mary Ann, whose arrival in San Francisco sets the plot in motion; Brian, an oversexed neighbor; Mona Ramsey, a whimsical bisexual tenant; Michael, Mona's gay roommate who befriends Mary Ann and Brian; and their lovable pot-smoking landlady, who has a juicy secret of her own, Mrs. Anna Madrigal. 

From this brief glimpse into the series, it would probably seem that these books are absolutely lurid and unforgivably hedonistic. Well, despite their provocative subject manner, the characters all come off as being extraordinarily heartfelt while remaining cautious of not stepping over the line into camp. Rather than following the path of "gay literature" and focusing disproportionately on the gay characters, this series is truly a patchwork of plotlines that give all of the characters a fair amount of room to grow. 

While the first three books are a portrait of carefree life in San Francisco, the final three take a decidedly darker turn. Despite the shift in tone, however, the series is worth sticking with. Though readers may be surprised by the note Maupin chooses to end Sure of You with, the series remains absolutely compelling up to the bitter end. Babycakes, the fourth in the series, is credited as being the first work of fiction to acknowledge the AIDS crisis, and it's a particularly moving book at that.

Tales of the City comes with my full recommendation. The entire series is a pageturner, and, while the writing isn't quite up there with the likes of Hemingway and Dickens, Maupin has some degree of literary aspiration for his earnest (and very funny) tales.

(t0p) Tales of the City, More Tales of the City, Further Tales of the City, (bottom) Babycakes, Significant Others, Sure of You.