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Meet Your New Friend Mike

Feel like catching up with some old fictional friends? A few of San Francisco’s most famous characters are back in Armistead Maupin’s Michael Tolliver Lives.
What began as a newspaper serial in the San Francisco Chronicle in 1976 would spawn six books and three mini–series. Millions around the world have fallen in love with the characters of mythical 28 Barbary Lane either through the six Tales of the City novels or through the TV movies based on the first three Tales novels featuring Olympia Dukakis and Laura Linney.
As Dukakis explains, in her autobiography Ask Me Again Tomorrow, Maupin “created a universe set around an apartment house in the seventies and eighties. It was a time of discos and drugs, and Maupin wrote about it all via a vivid kaleidoscope of characters that includes gays and straights, men and women. At the heart of Maupin’s city is Anna Madrigal, a middle–aged woman who used to be a man; a free spirit who owns a rambling, charming apartment building, 28 Barbary Lane, somewhere in the heart of San Francisco, where many of the characters...end up living. With the same tenderness she lavishes on her marijuana plants growing in her garden, she tends to her tenants, all of whom are searching for happiness and identity.”
Like the “kaleidoscope of characters” in Tales, so too are the fans. They range from famous people like authors Amy Tan, Edmund White and Christopher Isherwood to actors like Ian McKellen (Gandolf from the Lord of the Rings films). Sadly, though, we hadn’t heard from the residents of 28 Barbary Lane since Sure of You was published in 1989.
Fans no longer have to wait. After an 18–year absence many of our favourite characters are back. Despite an explicit statement on Maupin’s website last spring that Michael Tolliver Lives is “not a continuation of Tales of the City” and is meant as a “stand–alone novel”, MTL is essentially the seventh in the Tales series. As Maupin told Entertainment Weekly in July, “I was interested in pursuing the life of an aging man and I knew [Michael] would be the perfect vehicle…However, as soon as I started writing about Michael I found that, one by one, all the other characters stepped forward and asked to be present. And it felt natural, so I went with it.”

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