He is, after all, a man who proved himself a fierce activist for the cause of L.G.B.T. Maupin’s inability or unwillingness to probe the contradictory nature of his early decades - working as a reporter at a television station run by Jesse Helms, walking out of a church with his family when the church threatened to integrate - leaves a gap that wants bridging.

The memoir misses an opportunity to examine its most complicated material. In those early chapters we meet the insecure Maupin, child of patrician Southerners, conservative adolescent, Vietnam War veteran and supporter, a person so distant from his later self that one wonders how the second person emerged from the first. There is also vivid, sharp writing, as when he speaks of his grandmother as “this stately little partridge of a woman” or describes a sunset in Vietnam as “a fine blue pencil line across the landscape, the rice paddies a patchwork of shimmering green-gold mirrors.”īut this tips the balance of the book toward the kind of celebrity memoir that is hard to take seriously, to the detriment of the earlier chapters, which hint at something deeper. There is a good deal of what one expects from Maupin, wit and heartache rolled up into a tidy package, so that any anecdote can bring an ache of longing and a belly laugh all in the same paragraph. There are guest appearances by luminaries, including encounters with Jesse Helms, Harvey Milk, Christopher Isherwood, Richard Nixon, Rock Hudson and many more. We learn a good deal about Maupin’s seven decades: his family background, Navy career, Southern sexual frustrations and subsequent San Francisco awakening. Much of “Logical Family” is wry and sharply drawn. That they both inhabit the book indicates the real complexity of the man himself, but the dichotomy remains unexamined. The other is insecure, withdrawn, and a mite tone-deaf to the world around him. One is charming, effervescent, lyrical, hilarious, a name-dropper. There are two Maupins at work in these pages. He is telling us what matters, what really happened, how he was formed. Here Maupin undertakes to recount his own story without the mask of the novel or the short story. Reading the memoir of a writer you know from other kinds of books can be a glimpse into the inner workings of a mind you admire, and, as in the case of Armistead Maupin’s “Logical Family,” it can unveil how a fiction-maker deals with the requirement to confront the truth. LOGICAL FAMILY A Memoir By Armistead Maupin 292 pp.

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