With "The Night Listener," Maupin presents readers with Gabriel Noone, a successful, middle-aged, gay writer famous for his radio serial about the adventures of an outlandishly diverse passel of San Franciscans. Gabriel confronts two challenges in the course of the novel: getting over the breakup of a long relationship -- a "marriage" in all but the legal sense of the word -- and making sense of his new friendship with a 13-year-old boy, an AIDS patient and a survivor of horrific abuse who has written a moving memoir. Although Gabriel feels tremendously close to Pete and even goes so far as to refer to him as his "son," the two have never met; their relationship builds entirely over the phone. When Gabriel begins to wonder whether he knows the real truth about Pete, a remarkable mystery (the more so for being based in reality) unfolds. Salon telephoned Maupin at his home in San Francisco to learn more about his life and fiction after the "Tales."

This is your first novel in how long?

Eight years.

What took so long?

I've been working on three miniseries in the interim both as a producer and a writer, as well as adapting my last novel into a screenplay, which has yet to be produced. And there was a divorce in there somewhere, which ended up being partially recorded in "The Night Listener."

I'm also not one of those driven writers who has to produce every day or I'll fall apart. I look at my life as feeding my work, and sometimes I have to let things happen to me before I'm ready to write again.

With this book, you do almost everything but stamp "Warning: Contents May Contain Autobiography" on the cover. Most fiction writers go out of their way to stress that while there's always some autobiographical material to their work, this is fiction.

Well, we do want to have it both ways. I wanted to do that with this novel, too, because I play fast and loose with the facts, or at least with the order of things. I invented conversations that never occurred. I tried to be as emotionally true as I possibly could be, to tap my own insecurities and pain to make something that felt real to the readers. That's the single axiom I'm faithful to: Try to remain as honest and candid as possible. And don't hide behind a 32-inch dwarf actress, which is what I did in my last book.

There are two stories running through "The Night Listener," one of which is the breakup that you mentioned -- which really is a divorce because your life was so intertwined with your partner's. You began writing about that relationship in the "Tales," and part of what you wanted to do there was demonstrate an exemplary gay relationship. Did you worry about the "gay P.R." aspect of writing about your breakup in "The Night Listener," in other words, about undoing the social point you tried to make in the "Tales"?

Maya Angelou reads from "The Heart of a Woman"