It hurt my feelings, and I kind of resented Armistead Maupin for a few years. I had never before experienced a character in a novel (or in this case series of novels) who I had liked so much initially changing so much so as to become completely unrecognizable and also unlikeable. That may sound like hyperbole, but I swear it isn’t.

Regardless, by the end of the primary series, Mary Ann has left San Francisco to the true San Franciscans, and a piece of my childhood died with her departure. Maybe Mary Ann changed with the times and all of the other characters preferred to stay in the seventies forever. It never made sense to me why Maupin changed her character as much as he did, and maybe it would make sense now if I reread them as more of an adult, but I don’t really know. Anyway, as time went by in the series, the focus shifted from Mary Ann, who after a time turned from our plucky lead character to one of the villains of the piece, in a way.

This is a book-hoarder problem of the first order. I got totally wrapped up in the miniseries and had to watch it over and over, and then we had to go to Green Apple and get all of the books, used of course, though the fact that I don’t have a set with all the same type of cover art has not ceased to annoy me to this day. Of course, anything with my hometown as a setting/character fascinated me at the time, and still does. The novel focuses on Mary Ann Singleton, a newly transplanted secretary from Cleveland, Ohio, and her adventures as she adapts to a much different lifestyle than the one she experienced in the Midwest. I was first introduced to the series in 1993 or so when PBS showed a mini-series version of the first novel on Masterpiece Theater, starring Olympia Dukakis as Anna Madrigal, the pot-growing landlady of an apartment building on Russian Hill, at 28 Barbary Lane. Armistead Maupin’s stories of a bunch of San Franciscans living and loving and doing drugs in the late seventies and early eighties started off as a column in the San Francisco Chronicle and were eventually published as a series of novels. I started reading this series when I was but a child of seventeen. It’s really very unfortunate that this is the ninth book in Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City series, and also the first one I’ve ever talked about on the blog.

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