A strangely hard note to end on, the last in the series (or last for nearly 20 years) is a measure of distance travelled, of cultural history measured in friendships and lovers. Tales started out in the 70s, in the cultural comedown after the 60s, of the weird and relentlessly hopeful city of San Francisco. It ends in the late 80s, with yuppyism and AIDS and the dissolution of marriages and the estrangement of friendships.The centre of the action really is Mary Ann who has really become a utterly repugnant 80s yuppy. The slow creep of her character towards this over the last three books shows how her friends continue to give her the benefit of the doubt, to see in her the idealistic struggling journalist who fought to save DeDe's twins and who covered stories such as Jonestown. But newer characters such as Thack only see the Mary Ann of now, the grasping, fame-obsessed phony who puts her own desires before everyone else's. Now, I'm not going to say she throws away a perfectly good marriage. He's cheated on her, she's cheated on him, they don't talk about anything important, she kept the secret of his infertility from him, he kept the possibility of having HIV from her. This was never a good marriage. BUT she does not end it for any of those valid or glaringly obvious reasons. She ends it because Bryan no longer fits with her lifestyle. She's about success and networking and going places. Bryan isn't any of those things. Ultimately, she dumps him because he's not doing anything for her, practically or image-wise. She dumps her kid too, the kid she never really wanted and found easy to palm off onto a nanny at the first available opportunity. The kid it seems is equally underwhelming. It's hilarious actually because the power couple she really envies is actually a closet case and his beard. She's so shallow that she can't even recognise anything other than image when she sees it. And because she's not always been the monster she's become, you just read it and think, "You'll regret this. In five years or even less, you're going to come out this fame masturbation spiral and realise you have nothing real left in your life."Bryan stays. He stays in the city, he stays with his kid, he stays friends with Michael. Whatever life he's left with, he can plant and grow.In a weird way, this book mirrors at an angle the ending to the second book, where Burke asks Mary Ann to run away with him to New York, where the work is better. When she doesn't go, she asks Michael why she's so dumb as to pass up such a great opportunity. He tells, "Maybe you're just tired of running away." Her real life is in San Francisco, following Burke to New York is just a way to back out and start fresh without having to build anything or last anywhere. And that is said to her again in this book, Bryan asks if she's running away from Michael, whose HIV might any day become a horrendous and painful death from AIDS. Maybe she is, maybe that's part of it. Maybe she's had too much reality watching Jon die, knowing Michael could get as sick any day, knowing she's in a dysfunctional marriage with a man she barely remembers why she loved, with a kid that was meant to be the glue that held them together but never really stuck. Maybe she's running from too much reality into all that safe, glitzy image.Anyway, it's a strangely muted instalment for what is meant to be the goodbye to the series. However it ends of the possibility of new romance in Michael's nursery, a place where he brings new life, plants them and helps them grow. It's a nice image to say farewell on.
This was my least favorite book of the series (I haven't read Michael Tolliver Lives! yet), and I have to say that the only reason I don't give this book one star is because I really love the overall series and - like it or not - this novel wrapped it up.Over the course of the series, Maupin slowly abandoned Mary Ann as the "voice" of the series in favor of Michael; as a gay man writing about the often hedonistic world of San Francisco, this made sense and allowed Maupin to describe that world in frank terms without feigning first revulsion, then curiosity and begrudging acceptance through Mary Ann. I get it.What I don't get is why he felt the need to turn Mary Ann into a social-climbing, two-faced cunt in the process. I think that given the two extremes that Mary Ann went to over the course of the series (Midwest stick-in-the-mud to liberated woman of the 1970s), it would have been "natural" for character to stake out the middle ground eventually. It wasn't her leaving Brian that stuck out as being so out-of-character for Mary Ann, or even leaving San Francisco, but her motives. In the end, Mary Ann becomes a yuppie; a terminal condition in Maupin's world, and an affliction which never manifested any symptoms in Mary Ann prior to this book.I call bullshit.The other major development in this book is Michael's diagnosis of being HIV-positive. Not really a shocker considering that AIDS claimed the life of his lover earlier on in the series, Michael's reaction to the diagnosis didn't seem authentic for the period the book was set in; HIV was a death sentence until the mid-1990s, this book is set in the mid-to-late 1980s and was published in 1989. A drug-and-alcohol-fueled binge of promiscuity would have been more fitting for Michael's character at that point in time than quiet acceptance, in my opinion.All that aside, over the course of the first five books, Maupin created a cast of characters that were real. You can't help but want to know what became of them, and even finding out that the two major characters would leap beyond their previous characterizations to become a cunt and a curiously accepting HIV-positive man with no realistic expectation to survive until he got his own book in 2007 wasn't enough to completely ruin Sure of You for me."Sure of You" gets two stars - mostly because the first five books were so much better than this one.
What do You think about Sure Of You (1991)?
Here is where Maupin starts to get all sentimental on us - and I just love it! We also get what the "Tales" books have never had before - a villian that we can boo and hiss at. And what do you know? It's Mary Ann! The book is a wonderful study in how relationships change and how we all develop over time. The Mary Ann in this book seems a million miles away from the young ingenue that we met in "Tales 1" and yet she IS one and the same. Michael really comes into his own in this book too; no longer an idealised Gay icon, but a real flesh and blood man with all the insecurities and conflicting loyalties that we all must contend with. The "Tales" books have come of age and just continue to get better from here on in!
—Mark
I'm still really enjoying this series. I cannot explain how much I'm loving it -although I think there may be some bits that pass me by because I'm not up on 1980s (gay) San Francisco*!I'm resisting the urge to go and buy the next one straight away - after all, for years this was the end of the series and it was All People Could Get. I'm so glad there's more of it now.I love Michael and I think Thack is really good for him. I'm glad there was more Mrs Madrigal in this book - and thrilled to see Mona back.Mary Ann and Brian have always been my least favourites of the regulars - and she has turned into someone I'm not sure I like anymore - but then after this book she'd be very hard to like if you hadn't read the earlier stories and lived through it with her.This is a fabulous series - I'm so glad there's still more for me to discover.*Although the same could be said for 1970s (gay) San Francisco - after all I had to google Jonestown a couple of books back...
—Verity W
Anniversaire 26 ans - Par Laurent28, Barbery-Lane-street, une adresse devenue mythique pour tous les fans d'Armistead Maupin. Livre apr��s livre, l'auteur a construit sa petite com��die humaine, "sa sitcom litt��raire" dans les rues de San Francisco. On y retrouve la petite famille ��pousset��e des ann��es soixante-dix, pr��te �� prendre le virage des scintillantes eighties. Finie la communaut�� ��rotico-baba : Mary Ann est devenue une pr��sentatrice de t��l�� en vogue, Brian, 44 ans, travaille aux Plantes adoptives, un magasin de fleurs assez zen, et Michael, se sachant maintenant s��ropostif, lorgne du c��t�� de l'engagement virulent aupr��s du mouvement Act Up. Vaille que vaille, nos personnages vont de l'avant. Mais voil�� que Burke Andrew d��barque. On l'avait presque oubli�� celui-l��. Mary Ann n'��tait-elle pas folle de lui il y a dix ans ? Andrew est toujours un grand blond aux larges ��paules. Devenu un c��l��bre producteur new-yorkais, il vient proposer la fr��n��sie de la Big Apple �� nos r��sidents de la c��te ouest. Bye Bye Barbary Lane est le sixi��me et dernier tome des Chroniques de San Francisco et cl��t donc la cultissime s��rie d'Armistead Maupin avec dr��lerie et p��tillant. De quoi nous faire regretter qu'il n'y ait pas de septi��me volume ! --Denis Gombert
—Anne Claire
