• TALES OF THE CITY
• by Armistead Maupin
• [rated by PBS readers as #74]
• 371 Pages – that’s nothing!

5/25/20 – 20 PAGES IN

Leaving behind Gone With the Wind was going to be, I was sure of it, like leaving a long term relationship. I really spent a lifetime with those characters. So I knew that I would love a departure from all of that.

I picked four titles. One of them was Tales of the City and my heart leapt. Here is one of the few books on the list that I have always wanted to read and I couldn’t wait!

My husband, dog and I popped into the car immediately for a drive to Santa Rosa, where Barnes & Noble had it and they would bring it to the curb for you (we are all still sheltered in place through the pandemic).

Once home, I opened it and was even more excited. Short snippets of stories and scenes (this is what made it possible to be printed in the paper before becoming a book), this is a book about a young girl coming to San Francisco in the time when freedom, homosexuality, drugs all came out at the same time.

It should be said that I would have loved to be there with her. For me, it was college and gay men in Los Angeles and I had the world’s great time, so I am overly romantic about this period and these people.

But so what? Finally, I have reached a world I know something about – and that’s nice for a change.

It will take me quite a long time to get over Scarlett and Rhett. But Tales of the City will be a great companion during that separation.

I love it already.

ADDITIONAL NOTE: After a book that was just under 1000 pages, I don’t think that anything will ever seem long again!

Now watch me have to eat those words.

June 22, 2020 – that’s if we even count time anymore after sheltering for months! – Almost done…

I could have written about this book countless times while reading it. Except I couldn’t.

In a way, the strongest discovery and win from this project so far has been the number of ways I can be surprised by a book.

Surprised that Little Women was such a slog to read.

Surprised that I could hate Gulliver’s Travels as much as I did.

Surprised that I could like Monte Cristo as much as I did (now I’m gonna have to try that sandwich!).

Surprised that the two books for young adults, a market I had never before tapped, would be the most delicious surprises of the lot.

Surprised that I would finally read Vonnegut and Adams and end up just missing Tom Robbins (I’m currently jone-sing big time to read Even Cowgirls Get the Blues again!).

Surprised that my favorite part of Jurassic Park was when the dinosaur was chomping on somebody’s head.

Surprised that I would read The Sun Also Rises, a book that changed my life in terms of writing and a book I voted for throughout the PBS contest, and find out that my life-changing memories of it were wholly inaccurate!

Surprised that Gone With the Wind, after wincing through the first 100 pages, would end up moving me to my core.

And now we come to Tales of the City. I liked it immediately. That period of time in San Francisco is filled with romance in my mind. I felt it similarly in Los Angeles. It was a place and time where so many souls were peeking out from under enforced covers and finding acceptance. The mist-covered past where eccentric was accepted and revered – where did that go?

It is at this point that I need to refer to my friend Micaelia. We talked about this book and she made two excellent points. First off, she lived in San Francisco at the time and told me how exciting it was to go to the paper and read the next installment. And in reading this, it isn’t hard to go there and imagine that.

So many of these books, more than I would have imagined, originated as newspaper serial installments. I can’t possibly relate to what they meant within their respective environments. Too far back in history, and then there’s me – not a researcher. So too bad.

But when Micaelia described that excitement, it is all there. It’s in the pages. The writing must have been refreshing then; it is more than refreshing now!

Here’s where I hit a snag. Maupin writes this with such brevity that you sense he would consider it a failure if he had an extra word in there. In the mode of simply recording the gossip, it is almost journalistic.

And here’s me – loving brevity! I always love that. And the talent required to say and describe more with less. The problem for me is that, with every chapter 2-3 pages, jumping from story to story (although they are interlaced eventually and beautifully), I care about these people, but I keep having to remind myself of who they are. Who is this girl having an affair? Do I remember how this guy came into the picture? Stuff like that. It can give a girl a complex with regards to focus.

Enter Micaelia again. She started to talk about the Showtime series of this and the subsequent books he wrote about these characters. I remembered seeing a preview for that with Laura Linney and Olympia Dukakis and…

I am suddenly surprised in a new way.

After an almost universal disdain for seeing books I like turned into movies (I know they can be good. I just prefer my own visuals of the thing.), I suddenly know that I will love seeing this series. Because a true heavyweight actor like Linney will fill out the character. She will stop and give her the humanity that the character deserves, humanity that is flying by at a dizzying pace in the book.

Having said that, I’m not done yet and I look forward to how this ends. This might be one in a series that I would like to read more of.

See that? Surprised you, didn’t I?

June 25, 202  – DONE with Tales of the City.

I’m finding it difficult to add to what I wrote above. I do intend to revisit these characters, mostly because I’d like to read them before seeing the series. I will have to get reacquainted with them by the time I get to that second book. But then again, I was getting confused by them by the end of this one.

A refreshing read, to be sure. Unique, fun and filled with the magic and plethora of choices that are loaded onto the newly liberated among us!

I don’t have the slimmest idea of what book / experience comes next! Should be fun.

ADDITIONAL NOTE: I had no idea I was headed into an explosion of a book next!