The author of The Night Listener is Armistead Maupin, who made his name writing the tremendously popular newspaper serial Tales of the City (which later became a series of best-selling books and three television miniseries). Events in The Night Listener resemble some events in Maupin's own life, including personal turmoil and an astonishing real-life mystery.

It's tempting to see Maupin's book as autobiographical but wise to keep in mind Gabriel's warning. In any case, readers will have a chance to gain some firsthand insights into the author when Montalvo hosts an evening with Maupin on May 9.

"The Night Listener was my effort at explaining several troublesome portions of my own life to myself, " Maupin says by phone from his home in San Francisco. "By working through them in fiction, I hoped that I would be able to illuminate those situations. For some years, I'd wanted to write a story about this personal mystery involving the boy on the telephone, but I'd never felt that I had a real handle that would make it work as a novel. It kept coming off as sort of 'two gay guys as Nick and Nora Charles solving a mystery.' Then in 1996, my partner moved out and I had to confront one of the biggest pains of my life. I realized I was going to have to write about that if I was to confront it fully. That, of course, is one of the themes of The Night Listener, that storytellers distort and rearrange their own lives in order to explain themselves to themselves."

The "boy on the telephone" to which Maupin refers is a bizarre true story. In the early '90s, a teenager named Tony Johnson, who had suffered horrific childhood abuse and contracted AIDS, wrote and published a book about his life. Perhaps looking for mentors, Tony began striking up friendships, entirely over the phone, with a wide-ranging group of people: clergy members, media personalities, and well-known entertainers and authors, including Maupin.

Questions about the identity of Tony eventually arose, due to an accumulation of suspicious circumstances—in particular, no one could be found who had ever met him in person. Maupin says now that it's most likely that Tony was a hoax.

But The Night Listener grapples with the mysteries of the heart as much as it explores the twists and turns of an intrigue similar to that of Tony Johnson. In addition to his increasingly mystifying phone conversations with a terminally ill young fan named Pete, Gabriel must cope with the painful breakup of his relationship with his longtime partner and with helping care for his ailing father, who has never fully accepted Gabriel being gay.

"The novel's really about the way in which storytellers solve their own lives through storytelling, and the shaky line between truth and fiction that exists every day in real life. We all anecdotalize our lives," says Maupin. "We all tell stories about ourselves in order to explain ourselves to the world."

"The reason I do try to dip into my actual experience is because it does lend emotional truth. If you can convince the reader of that, then you can take them anywhere, even to a snowy village in Wisconsin that you've never been to, that doesn't exist," says Maupin of one of the novel's wintry settings.

Hearkening back to Maupin's serial-writing roots, The Night Listener was first released as an audio serial on the Internet. The audio format also married form to function for a tale rich in dialogue. "It had never been done; it was the first time a novel was serialized in audio in its entirety," says Maupin of why he chose the format. "But beyond that, I realized that a paragraph isn't right to me until I hear the music of the words—God, that sounds pompous," he interrupts himself, laughing. "But I look for certain rhythms, and they're oral rhythms, they have to do with how the paragraph would sound if it were read aloud. I think that's one of the reasons that people feel they know me, because they hear my voice when they read my books."

The serial format may also be part of what causes readers to feel a strong kinship with Maupin. One reason he says he likes the serial format is "the satisfaction I receive from connecting intimately with my readers. As an 8-year-old, I used to make my friends sit around the campfire and listen to my ghost stories. This is just the grown-up equivalent of that."

Maupin is currently adapting The Night Listener into a screenplay. There is discussion of the fourth Tales book, Babycakes, and Maupin's first non-Tales novel, Maybe the Moon, being made into films. Maupin will also be writing about San Francisco for Bloomsbury's Writer and the City series.

Maupin says that filming on The Night Listener is expected to begin in November, although casting details are not available at this time. He does say that audiences can expect the film to expand even a little more on the novel's themes of what's true and what's not.

When asked what, if anything, defines the boundary between reality and fiction, Maupin says with a good-natured laugh, "I think people who claim to write completely subjective autobiographies are patent liars. I would much rather write a novel and call it fiction and try to get at the truth that way."

Armistead Maupin appears at Montalvo on May 9, 7:30 p.m. Tickets are $30­$35. For more information, call 408.961.5858.