"Tales of the City"

Dear Armistead Maupin,

What happened to you?  Are you the creator of the beloved "Tales of the City" series?  Well, I'm reading your last "Tales of the City" novel, "Mary Ann in Autumn", and, quite frankly, I'm confused ... The dialogues are brilliant, all the usual excellent stuff is here, no doubt you wrote this.  This is you.  But at the same time, this just isn't you.  Know what I mean?  You don't know how to plot a thriller story.  You never knew.  But God knows you have plenty of other talents ...  So why this mock-thriller plot nobody would ever buy, not even a rusty roller coaster in a rundown theme park?  Not even you, not even me ... I keep trying to get inside your story, but you keep turning your readers away.  This is frustrating ... What happened to Love?  What happened to Life?  Mary Ann's second husband is cheating on her, with Skype showing the details to her and to us.  She is suffering from cancer, she comes to see Michael "Mouse" Tolliver at his place, where she can "lick her wounds".  Great.  So did I ... I was twenty something, madly in love with my university professor, so was she, but she was also very ashamed - so was my mother because she wanted me to marry an engineer, or a surgeon, not a female fifty-year-old intellectual of some kind ... "Yuk" was the only comment she ever made, I guess she meant "fuk" instead ... Anyway two years later my "love" was dead ... she died of cancer, with mets to the brain, stomach, etc. ... I got the mets to my heart ... I just couldn't seem to find the time and place and people to discuss the matter, so I just cried my troubles away for a couple of years ... Until one day, browsing around my local Fnac, I found Michael "Mouse" Tolliver ... Believe it or not, for some reason he and his friends became my best pals ... Life came back, light, movement, laughters, heartbeats instead of broken heart ...  The Night Listener ... How naive of me to think oh, now I just know all of this "Tales of the City" stuff like the back of my hand!  A few years later I got married.  To a Californian engineer.  He's sweet ...  But how about Mary Ann?  And Michael "Mouse"?  Love didn't pan out so well ... Michael's much-younger partner or husband is dating other people, once a week.  This cruel domestic arrangement - just a roommate agreement of some kind, like in the "Big Bang Theory" - is included in the wedding contract package thing ... Michael "Mouse" is not dating other men (or women), but claims he does for the sake of Equality ... and finds it heartbreaking that his beloved husband needs a break from him once a week, just like an au-pair ... Love is black, black soul, but mainly black heart ... No compromise love (gay and straight) always fails ...

Dear Armistead Maupin, I'm afraid you have some ugly mets of some kind to the heart ... This might be because, with "Mary Ann In Autumn", you've achieved some kind of antithesis of all the stuff you've written previously ... Any idea how you can cure the ugly mets?  Uhhh, let's see ... after the antithesis comes the synthesis ... So I suggest you just carry on writing ... and we the readers will be waiting for your synthesis ... where, somehow, the good stuff will be back ...

Warmest regards

Catherine