Tales of the City: Love, Family, & Joints on the Front Door

Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City is one of those famous books I had always meant to read but had never gotten around to. Facing a 10-hour drive home for Thanksgiving, I decided to bite the bullet and pick up the audiobook.

Tales of the City follows a format similar to many other books and films, introducing the reader to a variety of characters whose lives end up being intertwined in ways that we would not have expected. While this storytelling technique can come off as contrived, Maupin’s rendering of it successfully avoids this problem.

The central character (at least at the beginning) is Mary Anne, a young woman from the midwest who has recently moved to San Francisco to try life away from her parents. For the first third of the text at least, the story progresses as the naïve Mary Anne navigates her way through the bewildering 1970s city life, meeting many of the characters we will come to know more deeply in later parts of the book.

As the story gravitates away from Mary Anne, we get to know such characters as Brian the womanizer, “Mouse,” a gay man looking for love, his friend Mona, their mysterious vitamin-selling neighbor upstairs, their landlord Anna (who welcomes new residents by taping a joint to their doors), and Mary Anne’s boss and coworkers.

Plot events transpire at various pick-up locations around the city (such as laundromats and grocery stores with nights dedicated to finding dates), bars/dance clubs (gay and otherwise), Anna’s apartment building (where many of the characters live), Mary Anne’s workplace, and the high society parties attended by many of the characters. This mix of locales suggests the odd mix of characters populating the story: the naïve midwesterner, sophisticated San Franciscans used to the casual sex scene and the remnants of the bohemian lifestyle, mysterious drifters with hidden pasts, and the decadently wealthy.

It is difficult to say more than this about the characters without revealing details that would ruin the surprises of their connections to each other. It is worth, however, discussing in general terms the main themes of the book. All of the characters, in various ways, are dealing with issues of love and belonging in their lives: trying out different relationships hoping for something meaningful, struggling to make existing relationships work, and generally searching for deeper, more honest connections in an alienating and impersonal city. The characters betray each other, discover betrayals by ones they love, sacrifice for each other, reveal long-held secrets, and negotiate the pitfalls of friendship, family, love, and fidelity that we have all faced.

Honestly, despite these timeless themes, I was bored during much of the book and frustrated with how dated it was in many respects. However, at the book’s conclusion, I truly appreciated the clever and touching way the stories were brought together even further than they had been before. Despite my frustrations during much of the text, when I finished the last tape, I was surprised to find myself wishing I had checked out the sequel (More Tales of the City) as well.

The text is composed of very short chapters which were originally published as serial installments in a San Francisco newspaper in the 1970s. This format would make the book an easy one to read in stolen moments here and there—a nice feature for those of us too much on the run. At the same time, the short chapters and the fact that the chapters generally jump between characters does not inhibit the flow of the text; I listened straight through for hours without feeling any sense of disconnect. I would recommend the book to readers who enjoy explorations of the interconnectedness of human lives and emotions; it is a classic for a reason, and whatever its dated aspects, Maupin’s storytelling successfully drew me in by the end and left me wanting more.