MONA OF THE MANOR is out

I'm afraid Maupin isn't so great at a closer look — as a person or as a writer. I hope this isn't as self-indulgent as the last few have been.

Eh. Sounds like it could be fun, but I kind of hate when authors have to use their "universe" for every single one of their books. It smacks of fan fiction.

Hang it up, already. The well is dry.

He spends all of his money, R3. He has to write these.

At least it's an interquel, so we're not faced with following the same characters and pretending like it hasn't been almost 50 years since Mary Anne Singleton fell under the spell of Barbary Lane.

London ain't cheap.

He's lying about why he left SF. He sold his house in Parnassus Heights after going near-broke from his split with his first husband Terry and investing in a Bear-focused Social Media Startup with the current husband Chris. It failed. Current husband also owned Pantheon Productions (Hot Older Male) and they sold it off before they went bareback, which would kill the Maupin brand if the press got a hold of it. They tried renting SF and gave up to go to London.

I would have left SF for Calcutta.

Whatever the reason that he left SF, I loved the Tales of the City books as much as any I’ve ever read.

Can’t wait. I will never forget the shock when Jon died. - or Mona.

Just ordered mine off of Amazon. It arrives tomorrow.

Thanks OP...

I'll read it, if only for nostalgia. His books aren't as good as they used to be, sadly.

i didn't like Days of Anna Madrigal, but I thought Michael Tolliver Lives! had its moments. Michael and Mary Anne awkwardly talking after twenty years abd being cool...until Mary Anne slipped and called him "Mouse" and all of their emotions just rushed out was lovely, as was the moment with Michael's mother holding his wedding photo before she died. And the almost offhanded reveal that Mona had died caught in my throat.

I really liked Mary Anne in Autumn, and I make no apologies for that. More Tales...is my favorite of the first trilogy, so it kind of follows that the middle book would also be the most appealing here.

R7 He left SF and went to live in New Zealand, then eventually moved to England.

Didn't he move to Arizona or New Mexico at one point, or did I hallucinate that?

Yes, in that Guardian interview someone posted he says he lived in Santa Fe before returning to San Francisco.

Correct. He moved to Santa Fe, hated it, got on Facebook and asked if anyone knew of a good place in SF to rent.

Well, at least it's set before Tales of the City became "queer" and T and non-binary central.

Oh, but it will read as if it wasn't, R18. In the Guardian interview, Maupin explains that he has Mona rejecting a lesbian who doesn't want MTFs in women's spaces. He's very proud of himself about it, too.

"He's lying about why he left SF. He sold his house in Parnassus Heights after going near-broke from his split with his first husband Terry and investing in a Bear-focused Social Media Startup with the current husband Chris. It failed. Current husband also owned Pantheon Productions (Hot Older Male) and they sold it off before they went bareback, which would kill the Maupin brand if the press got a hold of it. They tried renting SF and gave up to go to London."

This...this needs to be made into a film! Gay men always ruled by their cocks.

I recently read Days of Anna Madrigal after watching the 2019 series ending miniseries on Netflix.

It was a completely different story! They killed off Anna in two completely different ways.

(The Burning Man stuff in the book was really annoying,)

I'm prepared to die for this, but I actually preferred the way the story was told in the Netflix series than in the books. I thought it handled Mary Anne much better, DeDe living her best life was great, and I thought the ending of Anna's story was better as well.

I don't think the miniseries was great by any stretch of the imagination, but the good stuff was good.

Agreed, R22. I didn’t like the silly twins, and the writing was clunky in places.

But we were back in Barbary Lane. And I thought the flashback of Anna’s arrival in SF was terrific. The actress who played her was wonderful.

Has Maupin ever bottomed that writer we're no longer allowed mention by name on here? Y'know, the guy who was in Paris, then London. I can totally see Maupin presenting hole.

[quote]I didn’t like the silly twins,

For the love of God, why weren't those two just written as DeDe's children? That made no sense to me at all.

[quote]And I thought the flashback of Anna’s arrival in SF was terrific. The actress who played her was wonderful.

Jen Richards was terrific. I didn't even mind that she was like a foot taller than Olympia Dukakis.

And I know, this is DL, I'm not supposed to say nice things about trans people, but I thought the screen version of Jake was a much more interesting character than his book counterpart.

And I thought the dinner scene with the eldergays (paralleling the one with Michael and John in the original) was great: it didn't invalidate Ben's Millennial views on things, but it also allowed the older guys their frustrations with the younger set being so incredibly sensitive. They shouldn't have been able to pull that off, but they did.

Beautiful

Yes, that dinner scene was terrific.

The series got off to a somewhat clunky start with Mary Anne’s arrival and her silly slankets, or whatever they were called. I was choking on all the exposition but it eventually found its groove. And Linney can pull off anything.

To add… I heard EP Alan Paul interviewed recently and he said the producers of the TOTC series believed in being totally faithful to the text.

He was referring to the early series, I suspect, because they tossed the book in the trash with the last series, and Maupin signed off, presumably because he wanted it made (ca-ching!) and Netflix would only do it with Linney attached, and Mary Anne wasn’t in the book.

Maupin has said in interviews that he's no fan of Alan Paoul.

Really? Alan said he speaks to him regularly and, on fact, had a call scheduled with him in a couple days.

I finished it in three hours.

R31 How was it?

Light, R32

With the exception of two new characters, there’s not much there.

Doesn’t surprise me.

The last book was mostly filler about building Burning Man floats.

Cash grab.

[quote]I finished it in three hours.

Yeah, I started it two hours ago and I'm two-thirds of the way through it. Better than some of his later novels, I'll say, but also much lighter.

[quote]In the Guardian interview, Maupin explains that he has Mona rejecting a lesbian who doesn't want MTFs in women's spaces. He's very proud of himself about it, too.

This is the worst part of the book. It's set at the height of the AIDS crisis and Mona has a very 21st-century view and discussion about transphobia. Totally unrealistic.

Most of his books after the initial Tales books have sucked big stinky donkey balls.

I see she's fat again.

Guess the bitter Betty comments about bears and fatties in his last few books are coming to bite him in the ass....

Big as a manor house!

Will it be as bad or worse than the last one?

R20: Daddyhunt is still around. Was it just a matter of losing money.

It was Bear Central. There was a pin-up Bear on bus stop adverts for it all over the city around 2012 or so?

Listen to him being interviewed on a gay podcast yesterday. The holes were out of their minds with excitement over interviewing this legend.

When he joined, they spent the first part, asking him what he’s watching on TV right now.!!!

(To the earlier poster, he said he loves Alan Poul.)

Nothing too interesting but he didn’t rule out another book in the series.

Just finished it. I have to say that I liked this one better than the Mouse Lives or last Anna Madrigal book. I would say this and the Mary Ann in Autumn book were the two most interesting ones to me of the later books.

Yes, the whole Poppy is a transphobe thing felt a little out of place/forced but it was limited to a few pages.

Mona running a manor had some nice parallels to Anna and Barbary Lane.

PS: Something about the rhythms of this book, its chapters, really had that sense of the serialized articles from the early Tales days. It felt a little soapy.

I thought the asshole husband would be another Norman, or whatever that creep's name was that was a killer at Barbary Lane.

Just finished it. I do not know who copy edited the final North American manuscript but there was a really weird problem with quotation marks. There were several missing so it made it look like comedies part of the narrative. However, this is Maupin, not Faulkner, so it didn’t lead to any confusion.

I was so glad to see the characters again. I loved the descriptions of the landscape and the manor. It was a quick read and I wish it were long. Wasn’t crazy about Michael and Wilfred. Dunno why we went through all the drama of Mona and Poppy only to have them be honest about their feelings and then have more drama and end it.

The sad thing was knowing that Mona dies around 1998 during the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal so her time after the events of this novel are limited.

Made it look like “quotes” were part of the narrative.

I blame publishers. They suggest any new book to resurrect interest in the series.

[quote] I do not know who copy edited the final North American manuscript but there was a really weird problem with quotation marks. There were several missing

I noticed that. Badly done in a few places.

I'm trying to think of what Wilfred would look like. Aboriginal and Dutch....?

Wafer thin. Mouse fucking Winifred was kinda oooky.

And yet another murder that is dealt with in two seconds.

He really has lost any mojo he had.

Yeah, the almost shrugging off the murder was the worst part of the book.

Do two drag queens and a tranny in a big pink bus named Druscilla stop by the manor?

R50 'He was violent, he deserved it'.

But Mona inventing the word transphobic is just so forced and sloppy writing.

R52 it's just so jarring, based on the time frame, when most people still said "transsexual" and the term transphobic didn't exist.

I'm guessing Poppy was a very lazy stand in for JK Rowling.

I had East Coast friends who had West Coast friends ship them photocopied installments from Maupin's series. Maybe it was the sense of urgency and reading the (later) books in advance snippets that made for better reading. But what a slog it was when I read in book form some later series.

Rereading the initial books was no treat either. The novelty of it all and some affection for some characters made up for the breezy and cheesy writing. Later volumes seemed only to get worse in quality. You could read them in a sitting, and probably better to di without taking any time to think about anything you had read.

Who can fault Maupin for cashing in every time he wants a new house or a move to another country or a fresh infusion of cash? It's too tempting not to do. But damn, the last how many of these things have been pretty dreadful, and the attempts to stay contemporary have fallen flat too often.

The first TV serialization of Tales of the City by Channel 4 was fantastic I thought. It captured the best of Maupin's storylines and characters without the baggage of bad writing. It definitely improves upon the thin volume that was the basis for it all. And the locations and spooky mood and so many elements and details were beautifully done. Subsequent Channel 4 productions were -like the books- less tight, less well conceived and done but still very enjoyable. The later Netflix version was okay or started as such - better than reading the books - but not so memorable as that first go by Channel 4.

Maupin has always seemed a little bristly about the source of his fame and also his inability to move.on to something else, as though he believes (even adores) all the hype yet thinks he's above that sort of thing. Fucking around with his one winning story collection and bring things amusingly up to date has never gone too well, though it seems a standby way to pay the bills, move countries, and start all over yet again.

And now he's making Mona a centerpiece. Mona, the least likeable one of the whole lot.

At one point in the novel, Anna talks about the “edible” she was given by Wilfred or Mona.

Was the term “edible” a thing in 1993? I don’t remember hearing it as a thing until the 2000s.

I was glad to get a dose of Mona. The book is crisp. The characterizations are good. It isn’t burdened by magical Barbary Lane. It’s a worthwhile read.

The Michael-Wilfred sex felt out of place.

Of his most later books, I liked “Mary Ann in Autumn” the best.

I hated what he did to her in “Significant Others” although that is a trajectory some people take. But it was also good to have closure from the story in the original book.

I saw him speak about this book recently, it wasn’t very engaging and he went in hard on how much he loves the trans. The eldergays sitting beside me were also v disappointed. I think the husband “writes” these btw.

Would Mona have been a Michfester?

I mean, DeDe and Dor went to WimminWorld, its fictional counterpart in Significant Other.

Back when Armistead Maupin started writing Tales of the City about about SF, across the GG bridge Cyra McFadden started writing about rich people in Marin County ("The Serial : A Year in the Life of Marin County") They both got syndicated and got book deals but Maupin was more famous.

I don't know if any DLers actually remember Cyra but she passed away yesterday at 85 on her houseboat in Sausalito.

With the earlier books, coincidences were always a big part, Edgar and Anna, Dor and DeDe, but all that is gone now.

I know he wrote two non-Tales fiction books. I read both of them but I can't remember a damn thing about either one of them.

One was about the midget stand in for E.T.

One was about a con artist conning a man in grief.

And, Yes, I am aware The Night Listener was turned into a film starring Robin Williams.

I liked the Wilfred and George Michael cruising and hooking up in the park bit.

Didn't Wifred run away, and only found out after he left it was George?

Yeah. Then he couldn't find him again.

r63 I LOVED "Serial." I was living/working in the Bay Area in the '70s and both it and "Tales" were required reading.

The movie adaptation of "Serial" was, however, a mess.

I do love what a name dropper Maupin is. Thanking Sir Ian McKellan on the acknowledgements page is so on-brand for that old starfucker.

R72, I initially thought so too until I remembered that McKellen appeared as one of the A-gays in the first miniseries so I guess I’ll give him that.

What does Maupin’s husband do besides creating sites for older men to hook up?

R61, no. MichFest had a “wimmin-born-wimmin” only policy.

R74 spends Maupin’s cash and ghost writes his books

Did you fart?

Of the original books, I liked “Babycakes” the least. It was set in a rainy period in SF, a moldy and damp manor house in the UK and was at the start of AIDS and everything seemed so grim.

It didn’t help that Maupin couldn’t have telegraphed the fact that Mary Ann would sleep with Simon as he looked so much like Brian.

R71 Ahhh, yes, those were the days in SF! You're right the movie was awful. She hated it too. Her second book, a memoir "Rain or Shine," got the reviews writers dream about but didn't sell, although Cher optioned it for five years without making it so Cyra made a nice little bundle anyway. We lived in the same neighborhood in the late 80s and my mother had sent me The Serial, which I loved too, so one day I accosted Cyra on the street and she was very kind to a gay guy starting out as a writer with a similar column (which went nowhere) about rich people in SF called "Specific Heights." We became pals and I'll miss her forever. A warmhearted, generous lady. Rest in Peace.

I never got the great love for them. They were enjoyable, but the serial form in which they began made them feel a bit shallow. I never got deeply invested in any of them.

And, before anyone makes the comparison, Maupin ain’t Dickens.

Maupin probably would have made a great soap opera head writer.

Today, we are going to rap....about rape.

Mother, I am a Gay Cuban Refugee.