My first exposure to San Francisco happened when I was too young to remember. My parents were coming home from Hawaii, and their port of call was San Francisco. So, much like my first experience of Hawaii itself, it did not make much of an impact.

My first real experience of the city, to my mind, came not from personal travel but rather in the pages of a book. Several books, in fact, all revolving around an apartment building on a sloping street (is there any other kind of street in San Francisco?) called Barbary Lane.

Places have a certain energy, and that's true nowhere moreso than in the pages of a book. I set a lot of my own stories in or around St. Louis, because it’s a place I like to think I know well, and thus I’m able to make that setting as real as I possibly can. The people in my stories have a certain character that’s related to that setting, either because they come from there and are thus the sort of people you’d expect to meet, or they are from somewhere else and play the role of the outsider.

Could you imagine Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City set in any other city in the world? Well, perhaps you could, but it would be changed fundamentally just as much as if Mary Ann Singleton came from New York instead of Ohio. Setting determines character, but not only that—a setting that's been carefully conceived and richly detailed becomes a character in itself. Not just a place on a map, but a house on a street, a room in the house, or a garden in back of that house where the strange and flamboyant landlady sits and smokes a joint.