Books by and for independent women

Armistead Maupin: Reading and Q&A

24.11.10, Waterstones, Manchester

Armistead Maupin has been doing a whirlwind tour of the UK: Liverpool, Manchester, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Leeds, Nottingham, Cambridge, London. He also seems to have fitted in a quick flit to Bath, sharing with tonight’s rammed room a meet-up with a long-lost relative who unfurled a huge genealogical chart and regaled him with tales of the “English side of the family”. Armistead’s background, it turns out, ties in with his much-loved character Anna’s back story: Mrs Madrigal‘s spirit is the reincarnation of Mr Maupin’s grandmother.

Following a heartbreaking stroke in 2007′s Michael Tolliver Lives, Anna Madrigal is bang back on form (if a little frail as she pips 80) in Mary Ann In Autumn, Maupin’s eighth instalment in the Tales Of The City series, which began in 1978. And she’s not the only one: having (I think mistakenly) given “Mouse” his own first-person voice in Michael Tolliver Lives, and zeroing in on Michael and his new husband Ben, transgender business partner Jake and religion-addled hen-pecked brother Irwin, Maupin has returned to making the women characters as important as the menfolk, if not more so.

Mrs Madrigal is reinstated in a central role in the lives of the people she touches, while Mary Ann and Brian’s adopted daughter Shawna reaches an even wider audience through her Grrrl On The Loose sex blog. DeDe and her lesbian lover D’Or get some perfect comedy walk-on parts, and Maupin is visibly over the moon as he describes welcoming Ms Halcyon back into his pages. Another fun, friendly and flouncy character in the limelight again is San Francisco, which always had a female feel in Maupin’s work.

The less male-orientated focus is perhaps down to Maupin’s eventual redemption of Mary Ann Singleton. Mary Ann In Autumn (I’m not sure if the MAIA acronym is intentional, but it’s more than likely, knowing the author’s cheeky love of wordplay) gives Mary Ann a second chance, having painted her in a less than flattering light in previous episodes and eventually out of the picture altogether. Maupin has already explained this estrangement in a recent LA Times interview – “She was the incarnation of my darker, more ambitious side, and she was leaving San Francisco at the same time I was leaving the series, so I could talk about my own so-called betrayal in that way” – and he re-explores the theme tonight: “I felt betrayal in a weird sort of way – not of my readers, but of my characters.”

Mary Ann’s punishment for brushing aside her friends and family so readily is finding herself in “the autumn of her years” with a tanked career, a second failed marriage, ovarian cancer – and no one to turn to. This, of course, is the springboard for her return and her chance for forgiveness from those she deserted, including Maupin himself. As he reads an extract from about halfway through the book, where Mary Ann is forced to face her convention-bound demons and finally lighten up (by having to wear a hideous swimsuit in public), it’s obvious Maupin has at last decided to make up with his original protagonist. “Mary Ann was a device I had written to do a news story about people going to the Safeway grocery to pick people up – the series came out of that,” he’d already explained.

I remark how glad I am that they’ve settled their differences at last as he takes my copy of the novel to sign, and as we chat I notice how he’s holding his pen. Instantly Jake and Jonah in the left-hand store spring to mind, and I recall how he’d described earlier in the evening how he uses “a little chunk of me, in my own life or personality, to make a character feel real”. Perhaps it’s this authenticity that sees us, and him, get so sucked in to the lives of these particular significant others.

Mary Ann In Autumn, published in hardcover by Doubleday, is available now on Amazon for £9.88

Guest post : Sarah-Clare Conlon is a freelance writer, editor and press officer. Her blog, Words & Fixtures, is about language, literature, arts and culture, and won Best New Blog in the 2009 Manchester Blog Awards. She is also the co-creator of Ask Ben & Clare, solving your problems so you don’t have to.