Kate’s 2¢: “The night listener : a novel” by Armistead Maupin

“The night listener : a novel” by Armistead Maupin

NOTE: There is a plethora of in-depth biographies of authors and reviews of their books, that state the title, author, published date, and genre; as well as, describing what the book is about, setting, and character(s), so, Kate’s 2¢ shares her thoughts about what she’s read. In her opinion…

   I like the way Ray Hagen narrated this intriguing story. It was interesting how the author incorporated the blind woman and her guide dog.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Armistead Jones Maupin Jr.[1][2][3] (/ˈmɔːpɪn/ MAW-pin; born May 13, 1944)[4][5] is an American writer notable for Tales of the City, a series of novels set in San Francisco.[6]

Early life[edit]

Maupin was born in Washington, D.C., to Diana Jane (Barton) and Armistead Jones Maupin.[1] His great-great-grandfather, Congressman Lawrence O’Bryan Branch, was from North Carolina and was a railroad executive and a Confederate general during the American Civil War.[7] His father, Armistead Jones Maupin, founded Maupin, Taylor & Ellis, one of the largest law firms in North Carolina.[8] Maupin was raised in Raleigh.[9]

Maupin attended Ravenscroft School and graduated from Needham Broughton High School in 1962.[10] He attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he wrote for The Daily Tar Heel.[11]

Career[edit]

Maupin worked at WRAL-TV in Raleigh, a station managed by future U.S. Senator Jesse Helms. Helms nominated Maupin for a patriotic award, which Maupin won. Maupin said he was a typical conservative and segregationist at this time and admired Helms as a hero figure. Maupin later changed his opinion and condemned Helms at a gay pride parade on the steps of the North Carolina State Capitol.[9][12][11] Maupin is a veteran of the U.S. Navy and served several tours of duty including one in the Vietnam War.[13]

Maupin worked at a Charleston newspaper and the San Francisco bureau of the Associated Press in 1971.[14][15] In 1974, he began what would become the Tales of the City series as a serial in a Marin County-based newspaper, the Pacific Sun, moving to the San Francisco Chronicle after the Sun’s San Francisco edition folded.[16]

In 1978, Maupin publicly accused San Francisco Police Inspector Dave Toschi of faking one of the Zodiac Killer’s taunting letters to the media, seriously and irreparably damaging Toschi’s career and reputation. Maupin claimed to have noticed a similarity between anonymous fan mail Toschi had sent him after Maupin based one of his Tales of the City characters on him, and a Zodiac letter received by the San Francisco Chronicle on April 24, 1978. Although the USPS crime lab cleared Toschi of being the Zodiac letter’s author, Toschi admitted to writing the fan mail and was removed from the case, destroying his chances of succeeding Charles Gain as chief of the San Francisco PD.[17] The incident is portrayed in the 2007 David Fincher film Zodiac.[18]

Personal life[edit]

Maupin has stated that he recognized his sexual orientation as gay from a young age,[12][11] although he did not engage in sexual activity until he was 25, and decided to come out in 1974.[9][42][43][20] For 12 years, he was in a relationship with Terry Anderson, a gay rights activist who co-authored the screenplay for The Night Listener. The couple lived together in both San Francisco and New Zealand.[44]

After his breakup with Anderson, Maupin married Christopher Turner, a website producer and photographer, whom he met through a dating website.[29][45] The couple was married in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, on February 18, 2007.[21] In 2012, Maupin purchased a home in Tesuque, New Mexico, previously owned by shoe designers Lynne and Dennis Comeau.[46] In 2019, Maupin and Turner relocated to London,[47] settling in Clapham.[48] In November 2023, Maupin became a British citizen.[47]

Maupin’s life and work are explored in the documentary The Untold Tales of Armistead Maupin.[49] Early in his career, he was mentored by writer Christopher Isherwood, who had a significant influence on his writing.[50][51] Maupin identifies as an atheist[52] and is a cousin of the British singer Sarah Jane Morris, formerly of The Communards.[12][53]

From NLS/BARD/LOC:

The night listener : a novel DB52746

Author: Maupin, Armistead

Reading Time: 9 hours, 54 minutes

Production: National Library Service for the Blind and Print Disabled, Library of Congress

Read by: Ray Hagen

Subject: Psychological Fiction

Downloaded: 04/18/2026

Gabriel Noone suffers from writer’s block, struggling to create a script for his late-night radio program and trying to cope with the departure of his lover of ten years. The arrival of a book manuscript by a thirteen-year-old boy who has endured horrendous sexual abuse by his parents changes Gabriel’s life. Strong language. 2000.

New York : HarperCollins, c2000.

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Kate’s 2¢: “Perfection salad: women and cooking at the turn of the century” by Laura Shapiro

“Perfection salad: women and cooking at the turn of the century” by Laura Shapiro

NOTE: There is a plethora of in-depth biographies of authors and reviews of their books, that state the title, author, published date, and genre; as well as, describing what the book is about, setting, and character(s), so, Kate’s 2¢ shares her thoughts about what she’s read. In her opinion…

   Margaret Strom did a good job of narrating this history of women and cookery. The author’s well-documented research delved into the 1800’s cooking and eating habits, then brought us up into the 1900’s and beyond.

   I like to plan my meals around some process, convenient  foods and home-made items from scratch and grown in my small garden.

 A few take aways:

–By watching what people buy, you can tell a lot about them.

–Food is a lens, through which to view the world.

–Perfection salad is the name given to an aspect salad filled with finely chopped cabbage, celery, and red pepper…in the 1905 Knox Gelatin cooking contest.

–We live upon, not what we eat, but what we digest.

–…apple, celery, mayonnaise salad packed into a tomatoe….bannana and nut salad tucked inside a banana skin

–…unless these families were willing to properly adjust their eating habits no change in their condition was possible.

–The best opportunity to install the principles of scientific cookery on a grand scale, was offered by the public school.

–Smith Lever Act: putting the education into the hands of trained teachers.

–…learning to cook by putting canned vegetables together with sauces…not understanding the science of the chemistry.

–Women’s cooking remains an anonnemous service to their families; while men’s cooking tends to become an highly personal gift to a grateful audience.

–Smooth and flawless and innocent, a light as perfect as a molded salad inspired the domestic scientist and they never dreamed of wanting food.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

laurashapirowriter.com

Laura Shapiro (born June 20, 1946) is an American food journalist and historian. Shapiro was a dance critic for The Boston Globe in the 1970s and joined Newsweek magazine in 1984. She shifted to food writing during her 15-year tenure at Newsweek, and in 1995, she won a James Beard Foundation Award for one of her magazine features.

Shapiro has written four books on culinary history. Her 2007 biography of television chef Julia Child won the Literary Food Writing award from the International Association of Culinary Professionals.

Biography[edit]

Laura Shapiro was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on June 20, 1946.[1] She is one of two daughters of Frances Sidd (1917–1997), a former caterer who worked for the Boston Symphony Orchestra (BSO) and Boston Ballet, and Harry Shapiro (1914–2014), who played the French horn in the BSO from 1937 to 1976 and was later the orchestra manager at the Tanglewood Music Center in Lenox.[2][3] She was raised in Needham, and she graduated from Needham High School and then Radcliffe College.[4][5] As her father played in the Boston Symphony Orchestra, her summers growing up were spent in Berkshire County.[6] She recalls some important life experiences in the Berkshires, especially in the towns of Lenox and Stockbridge and the Lenox Library, describing the latter as one of her favorite places.[6] Her career began at the Cambridge Phoenix and the alternative weekly The Real Paper; at the latter publication, in the 1970s, she mainly wrote about the women’s movement.[7][4][8] She was a dance critic for The Boston Globe later in the 1970s, and she joined Newsweek magazine in 1984 to write on dance.[8][4] She ultimately spent 15 years writing on food for the publication, during which she won the 1995 James Beard Foundation Award in the category “Magazine Writing on Diet, Nutrition & Health” for her feature “The Skinny on Fat”.[9][10] Her writing has appeared in Gastronomica, Gourmet, The New Yorker, and The New York Times.[8]

A culinary historian, Shapiro has written four books about women and food.[11][12] From 2009 to 2010, she was a fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, where she worked on a collection of biographical essays.[13] Shapiro and Rebecca Federman curated the exhibition Lunch Hour NYC at the New York Public Library, June 2012 to February 2013, which discusses how New York City gave the lunch hour its modern identity, examining a 150-year history.[14][15] She appeared in the first episode of a food podcast hosted by the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery, Ox Tales, released in 2018.[16]

Shapiro served a three-year term on the Massachusetts Council on the Arts and Humanities ending in 1974, and was appointed for another term in 1976 by state governor Michael Dukakis.[17][18]

As of 2018, Shapiro lives in New York City.[6] She is married to John Stratton Hawley [Wikidata], a professor of religion at Columbia University’s Barnard College.[1][19][20]

Writing[edit]

Perfection Salad (1986)[edit]

Shapiro published her first book, Perfection Salad: Women and Cooking at the Turn of the Century, with Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 1986. It examines the influence of science and industry on home cooking and the roles of women in the U.S. in the late 19th century, including the home economics movement and the development of the American cuisine.[21][22][23]

In an effort to gain background information for her work at The Real Paper, Shapiro began reading about the women’s movement of the 19th-century at Schlesinger Library, in Cambridge. During this time, she started conducting archival research on women’s lives in the kitchen, an intersection of topics she felt was overlooked, and working on what would be Perfection Salad.[8] Research for the book led her to surmise that “[f]ood coverage is either written by the food industry or at the service of the food industry.”[23]

Barbara Ehrenreich of New York Times Book Review felt the book had “deft humor” that some readers “may find unbecoming to a work of such impeccable scholarship”, though she felt it was appropriate given the subject matter.[21] In a review of the 2001 reprint, Kirkus Reviews noted some “risible facts” in Shapiro’s history, but felt it was not “palatable or even digestible reading fare”.[24] Maxine Margolis, writing in The American Historical Review, wrote that the book provided “a wealth of data on a topic that has been too long ignored” despite insufficient analysis in some places.[22]

From NLS/BARD/LOC:

Perfection salad: women and cooking at the turn of the century DB62572

Series: Modern Library food

Author: Shapiro, Laura

Reading Time: 11 hours, 15 minutes

Production: National Library Service for the Blind and Print Disabled, Library of Congress

Read by: Margaret Strom

Subjects: Cooking, Home Management, Social Sciences, Women

Downloaded: 04/09/2026

A history of the American domestic science movement at the beginning of the twentieth century. Describes the efforts of women to gain control of the kitchen using scientific methods that resulted in bland, processed food. Considers the influence of industrialization and economics on the way meals are prepared. 1986.

New York : Modern Library, 2001, c1986.

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Kate’s 2¢: “New Native kitchen: celebrating modern recipes of the American Indian” by Freddie Bitsoie and James O. Fraioli

“New Native kitchen: celebrating modern recipes of the American Indian” by Freddie Bitsoie and James O. Fraioli

NOTE: There is a plethora of in-depth biographies of authors and reviews of their books, that state the title, author, published date, and genre; as well as, describing what the book is about, setting, and character(s), so, Kate’s 2¢ shares her thoughts about what she’s read. In her opinion…

   Mark Ashby did a great job of narrating this interesting collection of recipes and history of their various Native American origins.

   I was pleasantly surprised to find out how many of these ingredients I have been incorporating into my meals for decades.

A few take aways:

–Listening to people and places is just as much a part of story telling as speaking is.

–grocery shopping can be an adventure.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Freddie J. Bitsoie is a Navajo chef and author. He was the Executive Chef for the Mitsitam Native Foods Café at the National Museum of the American Indian.

Bitsoie was born in Utah to Diné parents and moved frequently between Albuquerque’s Sandía Mountains and California.[1] He attended the University of New Mexico, majoring in cultural anthropology with a minor in art history before attending culinary school in Scottsdale, Arizona.[2]

James O. Fraioli is a published author of twenty-five books and an award-winning filmmaker. Fraioli has traveled the globe alongside experienced guides, naturalists, and scientists, and has spent considerable time exploring and writing about the outdoors. He has served on the Board of Directors for the Seattle Aquarium and works with many environmental organizations. Learn more about his work at VesperEntertainment.com.

From NLS/BARD/LOC:

New Native kitchen: celebrating modern recipes of the American Indian DB106243

Authors: Bitsoie, Freddie, Fraioli, James O.

Reading Time: 6 hours, 46 minutes

Production: National Library Service for the Blind and Print Disabled, Library of Congress

Read by: Mark Ashby

Subject: Cooking

Chef Bitsoie and James Beard Award-winning author Fraioli present a collection of recipes celebrating Indigenous cuisine and food traditions of North America. Categories include soups, salads and vinaigrettes, vegetables and starches, land and sea, and puddings and sweets. Includes a list of pantry items typically found in Indigenous kitchens. 2021.

New York : Abrams, [2021]

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