Armistead Maupin finished writing his bold memoir, Logical Family, months ago. He couldn’t have foreseen just how relevant his searing reflections on growing up in the deeply conservative, racially divided South would be.

In Logical Family, Maupin, a longtime LGBTQ rights advocate and the author of the groundbreaking series Tales of the City, lays bare his own struggles with self-acceptance and making peace with his past. BookPage spoke with Maupin by phone the day after the violence in Charlottesville that stemmed from protests surrounding Confederate statues.

“It was horrifying to see that much hate made visible,” Maupin, 73, says from his home in San Francisco. “When I was a boy, I got into a fight with my best friend, Eddie, because Eddie was a Yankee. He disapproved of the statues. He said, ‘You lost the war and you were fighting for slavery—why should you have a monument?’ It’s taken 50 years for this to come back up again. Stop tormenting our African-American citizens this way and stop celebrating what should be a public shame.”

Just as he is in conversation, Maupin is unflinchingly outspoken in Logical Family. The book title is based on a term he coined 10 years ago in his novel Michael Tolliver Lives. “[Logical family] is the family that makes sense to you; the family that supports you and loves you unconditionally,” he says. “How many people gripe about having to go home for Christmas and sit with some Trumpy old aunt—yes, I said Trumpy—and bite your tongue? I’ve stopped trying to win the approval of my family. Gay people have spent way too long being good little boys and girls and not relying on the strength of their real families.”

Logical Family opens with Maupin as a young boy in Raleigh, North Carolina. His father was an unapologetic racist who proudly displayed furniture made by “slaves in our family,” and his mother was a Southern belle. In this environment, Maupin developed strong conservative beliefs, at one point even working for notorious segregationist Jesse Helms. “I was trying to please my father,” Maupin says. “Even though he was teaching me some terrible things that I had to unlearn, on the other hand he had a ribald sense of humor and loved to tell stories.”

Given his upbringing, Maupin was deeply conflicted about his homosexuality and remained a virgin until his mid-20s. “Thank God that sex came along and saved me,” he says. “You can’t roll around in the dark in the bathhouse and not bump into somebody who’s nothing like you, but very much the same because tenderness and sweetness and passion are all the same.”

Maupin speaks matter-of-factly about his relationship with his biological family, without a trace of bitterness or regret. Regret, it turns out, is not something he has much use for. “I’m sorry that I was a virgin for so long. That’s my real regret!” he laughs. “I missed the opportunity for youthful lust. The real honest answer is we have to go through what we have to go through. I’m just glad we got through to the other side.”

A generous portion of Maupin’s memoir is devoted to his time serving in the Navy, stationed in Saigon during the Vietnam War. “I found whole stacks of letters from me to my mom during that time,” he tells me. “It was fascinating to reread and research my own history. To be perfectly honest, writing is never a whole lot of fun. To be done writing is fun. Writing is a process of slow, tedious self-doubt.”

“The thing I feared was the thing that ultimately brought me the most joy in my life.”

Maupin also recounts writing the Tales of the City column in the 1970s for the San Francisco Chronicle, which became the basis for his pioneering book and TV series featuring a transgender character. The column was a sensation in a city that was at the heart of the gay rights movement.

But Maupin is modest about his role in helping move our society toward acceptance of people who are gay, bisexual and transgender. “I’m very proud of my role in changing people minds, but there are others who have done much more in changing laws,” he says. “The best thing I’ve done in my life is help gay people change their minds about themselves. To find their own dignity and their own voice, to grow impatient with their own oppression. It just started out as fun, telling stories about my own self-discovery. But you dig as deep as you can in your own heart, and you come up with something others will get. For years I lived in terror of expressing anything in regards to myself being gay. The thing I feared was the thing that ultimately brought me the most joy in my life.”

To complement the memoir, a documentary, The Untold Tales of Armistead Maupin, directed by Jennifer M. Kroot, came out this spring. Maupin had previously admired Kroot’s work on a 2014 documentary about George Takei. “Any illusion you’ve ever had about your personal beauty is shattered when you see yourself on screen,” Maupin says with a laugh. “But I trusted her. I could open up to her in a way I might not have with other people. I said yes on the spot.”

Maupin has found his own family, and he has delivered a generous, deeply satisfying memoir. “I made an effort at poignancy and humor and honesty,” he says. “I always like to take people on a roller-coaster ride. Make them cry one minute and belly laugh the next. That’s the most satisfying thing in the world. Humor is healing.”

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of Logical Family.

This article was originally published in the October 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Author photo by Christopher Turner.

Endurance proves a fitting title for the eye-opening autobiography of astronaut Scott Kelly, who in 2014-15 spent a record-breaking year in space aboard the International Space Station as a prelude to one day placing space boots on Mars.

While conducting scientific experiments in orbit, Kelly’s body became one of the key NASA test cases for the effects of prolonged space flight on humans. He was subjected to 30 times the radiation of those of us below, or the equivalent of about 10 chest X-rays each day.

But if Kelly’s prologue (in which his excruciating return to gravity after a year in space prompts him to plead, “Stick a fork in me, I’m done.”) could serve as the ultimate NASA buzzkill, Kelly’s colorful look back on how a New Jersey underachiever wound up putting the “rock” in rocket man is anything but. Honest, funny and frequently hair-raising, Kelly’s flight notes and family struggles, including his painful isolation in space during the assassination attempt on his astronaut twin brother’s wife, U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, really bring this space tale down to earth.

We spoke with Kelly as he drove with his wife, Amiko, through the hills outside Houston, where they live.

Endurance is an unusually candid behind-the-scenes look at the life of an astronaut.
That was my intent, to be honest about it. Hopefully by doing that, it would let people feel like they were part of the experience.

As a wayward teen, you were inspired by reading Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff to reach for the stars. How crazy did that seem then?
I was headed to apply to NASA, but I would never say that I felt like I even had a chance [laughs]. That was what I wanted to do, but also, if that didn’t work out, my plan was to stay in the Navy and hopefully be the commander of an aircraft carrier someday.

What were the best and worst surprises your first time in space?
I would say the good surprise is the view. The bad surprise is how zero gravity makes almost everything harder to do, with the exception of moving stuff that is heavy or getting into odd positions or orientations—like floating upside down to hook up the cable to the back of your entertainment center.

Were you aware going in that your body would become an ongoing NASA scientific experiment for the rest of your life?
Not when I became an astronaut. I knew that the science experiments were a part of the shuttle program, but I joined NASA to be a space shuttle pilot and commander; the science was more a secondary responsibility. I never thought going in that, on the back end of my career, I would be such a large part of a human research study like that.

You describe the headache-­causing, underperforming carbon dioxide removal assembly (CDRA) in the ISS as the bane of your existence. How did you muster the nerve to confront NASA about it?
I think everyone has similar reactions to the CO2 issue, but when you’re discussing stuff like your physical reaction to things, NASA kind of keeps that . . . There are privacy issues involved. I thought that since I was spending the longest time up there at one time of any other American, I had an obligation, not only to NASA but to the public, to let them know the physical and psychological effects of that.

You open several chapters with excerpts from your dream journal. How did that come about, and do you dream differently in space?
When I flew my previous long flight of 159 days, I knew I had dreams in space, and when I got back, the psychologists would ask, “Were they Earth dreams or space dreams?” And I really couldn’t remember. So this time, I made an effort to write them down, and it was interesting. In the beginning, they were more like Earth dreams, but as I was up there longer, they became more like space dreams, like I was in space. And as I got closer to coming home, they were more like Earth-centered dreams, which I think was kind of just looking forward to being back on Earth.

Did the ISS come to feel like home?
Oh, absolutely. At some point, it felt like I lived my whole life up there. You kind of forget what Earth is like.

For most earthlings, the one cringe-worthy fact of space flight is the urine-to-drinking water system. How did you adapt?
It’s actually pretty funny because I was involved in it when they were designing and making the system in Huntsville, Alabama, in the late 1990s and early 2000s. I went out there to look at the system, and they were making water out of the urine of the workers in the lab, and I drank some and it tasted fine. So I took a bottle of it home and had my ex-wife, Leslie, and daughter Samantha drink it, and they were like, ‘Oh, this tastes perfectly fine.’ But then I told them it was water made out of urine and they got really mad at me, even though technically it was cleaner than what came out of the tap.

You describe being in orbit when Gabby Giffords was shot as a heartbreaking experience.
Yeah, you have no control over the situation, really. I was mad at the guy who shot her. He killed a bunch of people, injured others and ruined his own life.

As someone who obviously has it, what is “the right stuff”?
The way I describe this is, I’m a below-average person doing a slightly above-average job. I think if you are persistent and prepared and don’t give up and prioritize things to where you focus on the stuff that’s really important and don’t let the stuff that’s not important get under your skin, you can go a long way.

With four space flights under your belt, any interest in going to Mars?
Yeah, I’d go to Mars. I wouldn’t go on that one-way trip there’s talk of. It would take about six months to get there. They’ll do it someday. It’s not the rocket science; it’s the political science.

This article was originally published in the November 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

(Author photo by NASA-Bill Ingalls.)

Reading Kelly Corrigan’s Tell Me More: Stories About the 12 Hardest Things I’m Learning to Say is like reading a letter from a dear friend whom you can talk to about anything, who makes you laugh when you feel distinctly humorless or who can just sit quietly with you when talking feels like too great an effort.

Not surprisingly, in the 10 years since her first book, the bestselling memoir The Middle Place, Corrigan has become a voice that people really like to hear, whether in TED Talks, her podcast series “Exactly” or in her subsequent memoirs, Lift (2010) and Glitter and Glue (2014). Her latest memoir, Tell Me More, is a collection of essays about 12 phrases that she is working on saying more and have proved central to Corrigan’s life. They can be difficult things to say, like “I don’t know” and “No,” or phrases that are ostensibly easier to utter—but perhaps aren’t—like “Yes” and “I love you.” In every entry, Corrigan unpacks her life with poignancy and humor as she wrestles with relatable issues, from family blow-ups to unruly pets to debilitating grief, and muses on the things that give life levity and beauty.

But beneath every illuminating, empathetic entry in Tell Me More, there is grief and love that ebb and flow for Corrigan’s friend Liz, who recently died of cancer. Corrigan is a cancer survivor herself, and the disease marks a place in each of her books. “I’m 50, and it feels like half the people I know have had cancer,” Corrigan says during a call to her home outside San Francisco, where she lives with her husband, two daughters and their dog. “Frankly, cancer, in the ways I’m dealing with it in the book, is just my version of crisis. . . . Your version might be unemployment, financial setbacks, your parents have Alzheimer’s—you can sub in anything you want. [Tell Me More] is not so much about cancer, but about crisis.”

Cancer played a part in Corrigan’s initial decision to pursue a career in writing over a decade ago. “I’ve always written in a journal to help make sense of my life, and I’m a huge letter-writer,” she says. But her father’s terminal illness provided a new, urgent deadline to begin writing. “Self-publishing was just becoming a thing [10 years ago], so I self-published The Middle Place. The visual of handing my dad a book was enough to motivate me to write it.” The book’s later traditional publication, she says, was the “realization of a lifetime fantasy.”

It also began a transition into a writer’s life, one that’s grounded in communicating stories and learning about others’ lives. That’s a dream setup for Corrigan. “I ask a lot of questions. I’ve definitely been teased by friends for wanting a conversation to go deeper or further.” After all, she says, “That’s why readers are readers: We have some unanswered questions. Every friend I have, I’m asking them hard questions all the time. I want to know how everyone’s doing everything, [about] their relationship with their parents, their biggest fight with their spouse, who they despise at work and why. I want to know! I think that’s more interesting than almost anything.”

Corrigan’s burning curiosity isn’t one-sided, though, and in Tell Me More, she turns that gaze on herself with great skill and insight. During the writing of the book, Corrigan says she “needed and wanted something to hold onto. . . . My father and friend died, and I’m not a much better person for it—I’m still getting sucked into trivial, quotidian bulls**t. I’m still feeling sorry for myself.”

“It’s the ultimate compliment you could give me, that I helped you understand your life better.”

The result is a mix of workaday aggravation and philosophical beauty. For example, the chapter titled “It’s Like This” is about a hectic weekday morning gone maddeningly wrong, but it’s also a meditation on grief, impatience, her daughters’ quirks and the ways she and her husband handle stress. It’s also an excellent representation of how our initial reactions to events might be influenced by something else entirely. As the author writes, “Hidden in the morning’s frustrations, like a rattlesnake in the woodpile, is something else. I close my eyes so I can listen for the other thing—the further-away, much worse thing—in the quiet of my own head.”

When asked why she thinks people respond so well to her, both on the page and in person, she says, “Articulating emotions and notions is something I’ve done before you hear it coming out of my mouth. . . . I think that’s why people say, ‘I wish I could put my finger on it the way you do.’ I say, right, because I’m trying hard to, that’s my job, that’s my profession. I’m very happy to do that for all of us. It’s a total thrill for me, that I’m being useful in this way. It’s the ultimate compliment you could give me, that I helped you understand your life better or put words to something you couldn’t articulate.”

Tell Me More will be perhaps even more overtly useful than Corrigan’s earlier books. Its phrasal chapter headings like “I Was Wrong” and “Good Enough” make it easy for readers to turn to sections that speak to them. “To me, Tell Me More is all the more useful [because of] the way it’s laid out,” Corrigan says. “I could be more subtle about it. . . . But again, a huge impetus for me is to be useful—to make myself useful. I needed to boil it down to something memorable for my own sake.”

During her 20-city book tour for Tell Me More, Corrigan is looking forward to hearing which of the 12 phrases most resonate with readers: “One thing I’m really psyched to hear is what other sentences people are clinging to.” Plus, she says with a laugh, “I’m so grateful anyone wants to talk about my writing.”

This article was originally published in the January 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Author photo by Mellie T. Williams