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Logical Family: A Memoir
Logical Family: A Memoir
Logical Family: A Memoir
Audiobook8 hours

Logical Family: A Memoir

Written by Armistead Maupin

Narrated by Armistead Maupin

Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

4.5/5

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About this audiobook

"A book for any of us, gay or straight, who have had to find our family. Maupin is one of America’s finest storytellers, and the story of his life is a story as fascinating, as delightful and as compulsive as any of the tales he has made up for us."—Neil Gaiman

"I fell in love with Maupin’s effervescent Tales of the City decades ago, and his genius turn at memoir is no less compelling. Logical Family is a must read."—Mary Karr

In this long-awaited memoir, the beloved author of the bestselling Tales of the City series chronicles his odyssey from the old South to freewheeling San Francisco, and his evolution from curious youth to ground-breaking writer and gay rights pioneer. Also included is an exclusive conversation between Maupin and bestselling author Neil Gaiman.

Armistead Maupin was born in the mid-twentieth century and raised in the heart of conservative North Carolina, Armistead Maupin lost his virginity to another man "on the very spot where the first shots of the Civil War were fired." Realizing that the South was too small for him, this son of a traditional lawyer packed his earthly belongings into his Opel GT (including a beloved portrait of a Confederate ancestor), and took to the road in search of adventure. It was a journey that would lead him from a homoerotic Navy initiation ceremony in the jungles of Vietnam to that strangest of strange lands: San Francisco in the early 1970s.

Reflecting on the profound impact those closest to him have had on his life, Maupin shares his candid search for his "logical family," the people he could call his own. "Sooner or later, we have to venture beyond our biological family to find our logical one, the one that actually makes sense for us," he writes. "We have to, if we are to live without squandering our lives." From his loving relationship with his palm-reading Grannie who insisted Maupin was the reincarnation of her artistic bachelor cousin, Curtis, to an awkward conversation about girls with President Richard Nixon in the Oval Office, Maupin tells of the extraordinary individuals and situations that shaped him into one of the most influential writers of the last century.

Maupin recalls his losses and life-changing experiences with humor and unflinching honesty, and brings to life flesh-and-blood characters as endearing and unforgettable as the vivid, fraught men and women who populate his enchanting novels. What emerges is an illuminating portrait of the man who depicted the liberation and evolution of America’s queer community over the last four decades with honesty and compassion—and inspired millions to claim their own lives.

LanguageEnglish
PublisherHarperAudio
Release dateOct 3, 2017
ISBN9780062742599
Author

Armistead Maupin

Armistead Maupin is the author of the Tales of the City series, which includes Tales of the City, More Tales of the City, Further Tales of the City, Babycakes, Significant Others, Sure of You, Michael Tolliver Lives, Mary Ann in Autumn, and The Days of Anna Madrigal. His other books include the memoir Logical Family and the novels Maybe the Moon and The Night Listener. Maupin was the 2012 recipient of the Lambda Literary Foundation’s Pioneer Award. He lives in London with his husband, Christopher Turner.

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Reviews for Logical Family

Rating: 4.3062501 out of 5 stars
4.5/5

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  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    A friend turned me on to Tales of the City and I read them in quick succession. Great entertainment. So I picked up Logical Family when I saw it in the library and couldn't put it down. It's a memoir of growing up in the south (way to conservative for a gay person), leaving it, and finding himself. He regales us with his honesty and humor and intelligence as he takes us on a 40-year romp through his life. It's a fabulous read with delicious stories.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    If you've known and followed Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City books (and the TV serials made from them), then you probably already have read about, or heard about, some of his life stories that he covers in this book. Even so, to have the chance to hear him tell these stories in his own words, in his own voice, was quite special. Maupin has an uplifting and affirming way of writing, that is so accessible and so pleasant to read. It that style coupled with his sincerity and honesty that captured readers from the initial serialized stories in the San Francisco Chronicle, and that made all of his Tales books such a joy to read. Like many gay men of my age these books hold a special place in my heart and bring back many memories of my own coming out and my life journey since.That sincere, honest, pleasant style carries through here to the stories of his own life. I can't recommend this one enough - best in audiobook format.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I loved Armistead MAupin's Tales of the City series,and I'm happy to say that I loved his memoir of growing up in a conservative southern family and finding his own way to the truth of his life in San Francisco just as much. It's funny, sad, heartwarming and, ultimately, optimistic about the human condition. We need more people like him gracing out planet.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Wonderful story of Maupin's life, he narrates his book in plain and direct language. HIs anecdotes include everyday people along with the famous and infamous, for me they are part of the natural progression of the story. The audiobook includes an interview that touches on many of the topics in the books.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Armistead Maupin is a surprisingly divisive figure: people like or dislike his books for obvious political reasons, of course, but also for the same sort of reasons that readers disagree about Dickens: he is a writer who produced most of his work as serials under heavy time-pressure, relying on a superb natural storytelling ability, deliberately terrible jokes, topical references and sometimes rather too facile sentimentality. If you first came across Tales of the city at a time when there was no positive, funny light fiction featuring LGBT characters (as I did), you might be inclined to regard it as wonderful; if you saw it on TV and then went back to read the books you might just as easily dismiss it as too glossy, romantic and American. I think he's one of the great modern authors of light fiction, up there with Wodehouse and Alexander McCall Smith, but I know a lot of my (gay) friends just don't see the point of him at all...It's possibly a bit more interesting if you know something about Maupin's background - he comes from a very conservative family in Raleigh, North Carolina, where his ancestors included a slave-owning Confederate general, and his father sounds like the sort of lawyer who would happily have appeared for the prosecution in To kill a mockingbird. Maupin - although he was well aware of his sexuality from an early age - started out in life trying to fulfil the hopes of his family: he served as a junior naval officer in Vietnam, his first employer in his chosen civilian profession of journalism was Jesse Helms, and he volunteered for a veterans' "aid" project in Vietnam set up by Nixon's spin-doctors to try to discredit the anti-war movement (there's a gloriously creepy photo of him shaking hands with Nixon). It wasn't until he moved to San Francisco in the early 70s that he came out as a gay man and realised that the political movements he had been supporting were precisely those which were oppressing him and making it impossible for him to live his true identity. A large part of Maupin's reasons for publishing this memoir now, in the Age of Trump, seems to be to take us through this painful process of awakening again and remind us of how easy it is to fall unreflectingly into accepting the (sometimes hateful) ideas that we see around us in the communities where we grow up.Of course, this isn't the first time that Maupin has discussed his background: he's often used his relationship with his family and "the South" in his fiction, and he's always been open about his background in the press. In 1998, the British novelist Patrick Gale produced a very nice little biography of Maupin commissioned by Absolute Press for their excellent "Outlines" series of LGBT lives. By Gale's own account, they spent a hilarious few days together going over Maupin's past life in a series of interviews, which Gale eventually condensed into the 150-page format the series called for.Having read that, I wasn't expecting to learn anything radically new from Maupin's own recollections of his early life: not surprisingly, what he says about himself in Logical family largely covers the same ground. Maupin reserves the right, in an "Author's Note" in the new book, to "plagiarise myself", and does so copiously: a lot of the jokes and phrasing are very close to the wording that Gale transcribed from their interviews nearly twenty years ago. But of course, there's a lot more background detail, and a few slight changes of emphasis - I felt that Maupin's father was presented as less of an ogre, more of a slightly tragic buffoon who committed himself to an indefensible value-system and was subsequently unable to go back even when he knew that what he was saying was absurd, for instance. And Maupin's time in the navy is seen less as a foolish aberration and more as a youthful adventure that taught him things about comradeship, subversion, and how male communities work. Maupin wonders from time to time whether his professional storytelling instinct is leading him to "improve" on incidents in his past - there's a wonderful side-note about a discussion with the historian Douglas Brinkley, who, having been told the anecdote about Maupin's conversation with Nixon in the Oval Office, checks it out on Nixon's notorious tapes ("the tapes", Maupin calls them) and discovers that it was even funnier - in a creepy kind of way - than Maupin tells it.There is also rather more here about his reactions to the killing of Harvey Milk, whom he seems to have known quite well. This is one event that Maupin obviously felt he was too close to to be able to bring it into his fiction - I was always a little puzzled about why he used the (more obscure, to most of us) Jonestown massacre in a plot without any mention of Milk. (I don't think the cover designer of this book can have noticed the comment about Milk disregarding a death-threat because it was written in crayon, though...)An interesting, funny, and very well written memoir, as you would expect - probably something to read for the pleasure of the text rather than for the information it brings.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    3.5 Engaging memoir of this author, who was raised in the South by a father who was raging racist and homophobe. Hiding his own sexuality caused much conflict within himself, and in trying to please his father he enrolled in law school, which he soon dropped out. Then he joined the service and was sent to Vietnam. Eventually he would find acceptance professionally with the serialization of Tales in the City. Personally he would form a logical family, those in whose company he felt accepted, including Rock Hudson. For years he hid his sexual inclinations from his family but finally came out to his sister, who at the time told him his mother also knew, they did agree it was wiser, however, to not tell his father.As he mentions, "Southern women keep secrets to protect their delicate men." I'm not Southern so don't know if that is true or not but I do believe most women everywhere do the same. His writing is most natural, it flows so well. So much history, the sixties, the war, his career, and how his thoughts changed as he gained confidence in himself. Found this a most interesting memoir, and now a confession. I have never read this authors fiction but......I do intend to and to start with Tales of the City. I find that after reading memoirs or autobiographies of authors and I then read their novels, I have a different take, a keener insight into their work.ARC from Edelweiss.