"I wanted to focus on just one character, which I had done in the other books from chapter to chapter so it wasn't hard to do that for an entire novel. "I'd written my last two novels Maybe the Moon and The Night Listener in the first-person so it wasn't an unfamiliar experience and I knew Michael well enough to speak in his voice," says Maupin. Michael Tolliver Lives is distinctly different to Tales of the City as it is very much Michael's story and is told in the first-person.
"Then I looked around and saw that so many of my friends were still alive and living with AIDS so Michael would probably be as well and I used that as an opportunity to trace that kind of journey the guys who have had the stamina and the courage to keep themselves alive all these years." That was pretty much the understanding at the time if you contracted the virus you would be dead in a matter of months, maybe years. "When I stopped the series in 1988, I didn't think Michael would be alive. "I was considering writing a novel about a middle-aged man who had survived AIDS and it dawned on me that I knew such a middle-aged man in the form of Michael," says Maupin.
So much so, in fact, that nearly 20 years later, Maupin has made a return to his most famous creation in the triumphantly titled Michael Tolliver Lives. However, like many real-life AIDS sufferers whose lives were prolonged due to advances in medical science,'Mouse' - as the now 55-year-old gardener is affectionately known - has proved to be unexpectedly resilient. When the sixth and final volume Sure of You was published in 1989, Maupin believed that the HIV-positive Tolliver would not be long for this world. Characters often surprise their authors with their actions but none have caught their creator unawares in as life-affirming a manner as Michael Tolliver, the central protagonist from Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City series about a motley group of lovelorn gay and straight misfits living in San Francisco's bohemian district the Castro during the 1970s and 1980s.
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