Why We Write (16 page)

Armistead Maupin

Why I write

I write to explain myself to myself. It’s a way of processing my disasters, sorting out the messiness of life to lend symmetry and meaning to it.

A dozen or so years ago, in
The Night Listener
, I wrote about a breakup while still going through it, believing this might lead to enlightenment. But I wasn’t so much confronting my pain as containing it, stuffing it into a tidy in-box called “novel” that would keep the worst pain at a distance. Most writers channel their experience like this, but it’s a tricky business. Life has to be something more than Material. The novel can end up writing you.

Sometimes I write to explain myself to others. Thirty-four years ago I told my folks I was gay through the
Tales of the City
character Michael Tolliver. They were following my
Chronicle
serial, so I used the shield of fiction to break the news to them. When Michael came out in a letter to his parents, my own parents were the ones who got the message. Writing gave me a way to frame my thoughts and feelings without the danger of actual confrontation.

Long before I started writing, I enjoyed telling stories and holding the attention of an audience. Southerners tend to do that. By the time I was eight I was putting folk legends and ghost stories into my own words, telling them around the campfire at summer camp and on Boy Scout trips. I was lousy at sports, but I could keep the other kids on the edge of their logs. I think I learned to find my self-worth that way.

Writing is not fun for me. The early part is fun—the percolating, as I think of it—but the actual process is glacial and full of self-doubt. I think of it as laying mosaic on my hands and knees, pushing the bits of color into place, knowing that the finished product is a long way from completion. I’ve learned to be disciplined about this only because of the pleasure that will come at the end. I’ll get to stand in a room somewhere—last year in the big hall of the Sydney Opera House!—and read the words I’ve agonized over and be rewarded by the laughter and attentive silence of other people. We’re on that log around the campfire again.

I don’t mean to say that I don’t have those glorious moments when I look at a paragraph and find it every bit as graceful and illuminating as I wanted it to be. I’ve been known to do a little jig around the room when that happens. The problem is, I can’t let myself proceed until I’m thoroughly happy with that paragraph. Every writer’s manual on the planet tells you to just spill it all out and polish it later. I haven’t been able to do that since the late seventies, when I was writing the serial on carbon paper, choosing my words and moving on immediately because of the daily newspaper deadline. The word processor, as much as I can’t imagine life without it, has only made me pokier, since it enables me to polish endlessly. At best, I’ll write only a page or two a day when working on a novel. I want my books to read like a brisk run through the woods, so my job is to get the obstacles out of the way. That takes time and sweat. A lot of people assume that a fast read is a fast write. Oh, if only that were true.

Somerset Maugham once said that he made three demands of his writing: lucidity, simplicity, and euphony. That pretty
well describes my own goals, though euphony would probably come first for me. I think of it as finding the music.

Here’s another reason I write: I’m still paying the mortgage on my house

Some people assume that famous writers are rich. I know a number who are quite comfortable, but most are still hustling to pay for necessities like everybody else.

I’ve designed the life I’ve wanted for myself, complete with home and husband, but it doesn’t involve opulence. I’ve written ten novels over thirty-five years, which has allowed for some lovely leisure—a dividend in itself—and saved me from nine-to-five slavery under fluorescent lights. And here’s what made it even sweeter: the thing I’d once feared most in myself—my homosexuality—became the very foundation of my success. I trusted my gut in this regard. There were plenty of folks in publishing three decades ago who advised me to cool it with the gay stuff. The closet was still very much entrenched, and my newfound openness was seen as an embarrassment—a professional liability, even. My mother once told me she was happy that I’d found myself, but she didn’t want it to hurt my career. “You don’t understand,” I replied. “It
is
my career.”

Being an openly gay artist was a rarified club in those days, so it brought some wonderful people my way. Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy became friends and guides. David Hockney asked me to sit for him. Ian McKellen sought my advice before he himself came out. There was also enormous satisfaction to be found in the readers who told me that
Tales of the City
had changed their lives—or at least helped them to see the
beauty and nobility of their lives. I think I was able to do that because I wrote about everyone—gay, straight, and traveling—and presented them all as equally worthy and interesting.

Thank you, Mrs. Peacock

Mrs. Peacock was my senior English teacher in high school. She was a fey little bird of a woman who showed blatant favoritism toward students she thought to be talented. In the course of three or four years, she taught and singled out Anne Tyler, Reynolds Price, and me—all of whom sang her praises to the press after her death.

My senior English project was to create a staged presentation in the school auditorium that focused on some aspect of literature. I chose “sleep.” I dressed all in white and performed next to a Doric column that I’d made out of ice cream cartons and Con-Tact paper. I read the “ravell’d sleeve” bit from
Macbeth
and concluded with Tennyson’s “The Lotos-Eaters,” a poem that is said to work as a soporific. Mrs. Peacock, bless her heart, demonstrated this feature by pretending to be asleep after the presentation.

It was a long, slow journey to a writing career after that. I wrote a satiric column for the
Daily Tar Heel
, the student paper at the University of North Carolina. I fancied myself as a cross between Art Buchwald and William F. Buckley Jr. I was the campus conservative, much to the pride of my father. I had to find some way to make my parents profoundly happy with me, because I knew there was something profoundly off about me that wasn’t going to sit well.

From there I stumbled along on a disastrous course toward
the law. My father was a lawyer, and I’d been programmed to work in his law firm. I became the president of my Chapel Hill law class and proceeded to hang out at Fellini films in the downtown theater while my classmates were studying. Finally, at the end of my first year, I faced the truth. Not only didn’t I want to spend the next two years in law school, I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life being a lawyer. So I ended my law career at age twenty-two by walking out of my equity exam.

Oops—there was a war on

I went home to Raleigh and told my father I didn’t want to be a lawyer. But this was 1967, the height of the Vietnam War, and being a student was my only possible draft exemption. With the help of Jesse Helms and a few of my father’s cronies, I got assigned to officer candidate school. I served one tour of duty in Charleston and the Mediterranean, and a second tour in Vietnam.

When I got back from Vietnam, I moved back to Charleston. I spent a year working for the
News & Courier
, the South’s oldest daily newspaper. I was writing feature stories about the Spanish moss blight and chitlin’ festivals, interviewing Strom Thurmond and his third beauty queen wife. I started picking up guys down at the Battery, where the first shots of the Civil War were fired. Kind of appropriate, really, for the great-great-grandson of a Confederate general.

My sexual awakening—make that unleashing—was transformative. It made me question everything. Not just my sexuality, but my racism, my misogyny, all the bullshit I’d been raised with in Raleigh. I got restless fast in Charleston, so I
interviewed with the Associated Press in New York. They offered me a job in Buffalo. When I rejected it, they offered me San Francisco.

San Francisco, here I come

I adored San Francisco, but I hated working for the AP. Wire service work means you’re always on deadline. And I was always trying to make the stories more vivid, so I was very, very slow.

One of my bosses was quite mean about this one night when we were working together. “I’m on to you,” he said, pointing his finger at me. “You’re no reporter.” I was a wreck for the rest of the evening, thinking I’d blown it as a writer. Last year this man waited in line to get my autograph at a book signing. I’m sure he didn’t remember the time he’d trashed me, but I did.

I quit the AP after five months and looked for work elsewhere. I became a Kelly Girl, unloading mannequins from warehouses, handing out flyers. What agonizing shit that was. Then I worked as a mail boy and eventually as a copywriter at an ad agency, which gave me the color I needed to describe Halcyon Communications in
Tales of the City.
I hated that job, too. When I quit, I felt I should offer some excuse beyond sheer boredom, so I confessed to my boss that I was gay. He said, “So what? I’m fucking the secretary, and we’re both married.”

My big break came when I started doing a column about goings-on around town for the San Francisco edition of the
Pacific Sun.
I went to a nude encounter parlor. I wrote about Sally Rand, the seventy-year-old fan dancer. One day I checked out the hetero cruising scene at the Marina Safeway, where the girls were all dressed to the nines in their brushed denim pantsuits.
None of them would fess up to their reason for being there, so that night I went home and made up a new girl in town named Mary Ann Singleton. That’s how
Tales of the City
was born.

Lucky me

I’ve had a unique opportunity with
Tales
. Interrupted by a few pleasant breaks for film work and other novels, I’ve been telling the same story for thirty-four years. Even my departure novels, like
Maybe the Moon
, have contained minor characters from the
Tales
universe. I’ve followed the same people through everything: love, death, marriage, birth, disease, self-discovery—the full catastrophe, as Zorba called it. It’s like having a big yeasty ball of sourdough in the back room that’s always there for me to draw on.

People sometimes ask if I know what my characters are up to at any given moment. No, of course not. But I know how to find them again. I just tap into whatever aspect of my own personality helped me identify them in the first place. In this way they become a scrapbook of my emotional terrain. The closer you get to your own raw nerves, the more likely you are to reel someone who feels the same way. And you get credit, of course, for being deeply candid and honest—even though, as any writer knows, there’s always a certain amount of vanity involved in the boldest confession.