As new friends, lovers, spouses, and children are written in and out of the plot, she remains the series’ wise and witty elder. (We also learn that Mona is her biological daughter). Anna, a transgender woman whose name can be rearranged to spell “a man and a girl,” becomes the mother of this surrogate family. When Mary Ann asks if she objects to pets, Anna replies, “Dear…I have no objection to anything.” As Mary Ann later puts it, Barbary Lane is “like something out of a fairy tale.” The daydream of belonging amid reasonably priced comfort now feels more fantastic than ever.Īnna, Mary Ann, and the other original residents of 28 Barbary Lane-the gay everyman Michael “Mouse” Tolliver, the restless bohemian Mona Ramsey, and the sensitive lothario Brian Hawkins-would become the core characters of the Tales series as it unfolded over nine books, the final one published in 2014.

New tenants are welcomed with a joint taped to their apartment door. The enigmatic, anagrammatically named landlady, Anna Madrigal, is just as funky and endearing as her home. Of course she did: Her fully furnished single (utilities included) is $170 a month, or about $770 adjusted for inflation.

On her first day scouring the rental listings, the unemployed 25-year-old scores a room at 28 Barbary Lane, “a ramshackle, two-story structure made of brown shingles” located along a secluded footpath in the tony old Russian Hill neighborhood. As the serial opened in the San Francisco Chronicle in May 1976, Mary Ann Singleton, a naive yet plucky tourist from Cleveland, has just decided to extend her stay in the city indefinitely. Tales of the City, Armistead Maupin’s beloved saga of life in San Francisco, begins with a fantasy of affordable housing. Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

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