MONA OF THE MANOR

A late-breaking 10th installment in the beloved Tales of the City series.

In 1978, we met a landlady named Anna Madrigal with a rooming house on Barbary Lane in San Francisco. Among her boarders were a lovable gay man named Michael Tolliver and a bohemian bisexual woman named Mona Ramsay, in whom Anna seemed to take a rather maternal interest, which made sense when we eventually found out that pre-transition, she was Mona’s father. (Even if you only watched the TV series, you know all this.) After moving the story as far as Anna’s 93rd birthday in The Days of Anna Madrigal (2014), Maupin returns now with an installment set in the 1990s, when Anna was only 73, and focusing on a character who’s been AWOL for a while. Turns out Mona Ramsay’s lavender marriage to the now-deceased Lord Teddy Roughton left her with a sprawling estate in the Cotswolds. Lady Mona has also acquired an adopted gay son; 26-year-old Wilfred identifies as native Australian—“Aborigine, with some Dutch thrown in”—and the two are soon running Easley House as a country lodge. As the book opens, Rhonda and Eddie Blaylock of North Carolina arrive. Eddie has just headed up Jesse Helms’ reelection campaign, though the senator has been snubbing him since then. When Rhonda suggests Helms is not a nice man, Eddie throws a casserole dish at her. Her concealer stick doesn’t cover the damage, and Mona and Wilfred get involved. Other plotlines feature Poppy the postmistress, Mona’s sometime girlfriend, who wants to paint Mona underwater in the style of Dante Gabriel Rossetti; George Michael, whom Wilfred encounters briefly at a London cruising spot with a condom table; and Michael Tolliver and Anna Madrigal themselves, popping in for a visit just in time for the Midsummer party. Though AIDS sits large upon the land, the characters are determined to enjoy what time they have, both in and out of bed. When Mona laments all the gorgeous hunks already lost, Michael replies, “I know plenty of ugly guys who died of AIDS.” Pure Maupin.

The fans rejoice.