' Logical Family is a sweet, filthy peach of a memoir from a cultural explosion of a man' Caitlin Moran 'A beautiful memoir -- so tender and funny and dignified and kind that it left me a little weepy' Alan Cumming 'I read Logical Family as slowly as I could. It was like having the great man visit and sit smoking and gossiping from an armchair at the foot of the bed' Patrick Gale __________ In this long-awaited memoir, the beloved author of the bestselling Tales of the City series chronicles his odyssey from the old South to freewheeling San Francisco, and his evolution from curious youth to ground-breaking writer and gay rights pioneer. Raised in the heart of conservative North Carolina, Armistead Maupin lost his virginity to another man 'on the very spot where the first shots of the Civil War were fired'. Realizing that the South was too small for him, this son of a traditional lawyer packed his earthly belongings into his Opel GT and took to the road in search of adventure. It was a journey that would lead him from a homoerotic Navy initiation ceremony in the jungles of Vietnam to that strangest of strange lands: San Francisco in the early 1970s.