[In the following review of Sure of You, Gerrard praises the story as a "bright, funny, engaging and loquacious soap."]

Writers—like Dickens or even Fay Weldon—have written newspaper serials which have then appeared in novel from; others—like Trollope, Anthony Powell, Catherine Cookson—have written novel series. Armistead Maupin has combined both, and become a cult. It is easy to see why. Sure of You, the sixth and final novel in his Tales of the City sequence—written in installments over the years—has a narrative as easy to pick up as The Archers after a long holiday, and as hard to put down as any good potboiler.

Set in San Francisco, Sure of You is about the contemporary life of the city as much as any of its inhabitants. Each vignette—the dinner parties in chintzy condos, the gay nightclubs, the AZT bleepers uniting strangers in bars, the celebrity gatherings where West Coast personalities feel like hicks beside their New York colleagues, the triangular trellis round which one character grows pink flowers (symbol of gay liberation), the journey that a mother and daughter make to Lesbos—fills in our picture of San Francisco. The novel is littered with specific contemporary references: the latest fads (like a realistic model of Jeff Stryker's Cock and Balls', clitoris jewelry, pamphlets about G-spot delights, or designer wedding rings); the latest changes to hilly street names; the newly fashionable venues.

Armistead Maupin follows the fortunes of its main characters through their unashamedly episodic crises. There is the TV chat show hostess, oh so sweet Mary Ann Singleton, with cute clothes, swizzly eyes and a greedy ambition that makes her—by the end of the novel—leave husband, unworldly Brian the lawyer turned nurseryman, and daughter Shawna for New York's bigger pond. Then there's Michael, HIV positive and in love with life; his lover Thack, proud to be gay, mordant and witty; engaging Mrs Madrigal (Mary Ann's landlady from previous novels) who wears her hair in spikes and grabs pleasure where she can; Mrs Madrigal's daughter Mona, married to a lord in Gloucestershire but looking for sisterly love among the tents at Lesbos.

Each chapter brings two or more characters together—very often to discuss the others. For such a fast-paced and garrulous novel, there is actually very little plot. Apart from the frisky sub-plot in Lesbos, Sure of You is the opposite of picaresque: when Mary Ann moves to New York she can only re-enter the novel on the TV screen in a San Francisco flat.

The threat of Aids shadows the central characters' lives: Michael's former lover Jon (a ghost from other Tales of the City novels) has died of Aids; Michael's bleeper punctuates the episodes like a kind of narrative time-keeper. But in spite of its political messages and sense of life lived on the edge of tragedy, Sure of You is a bright, funny, engaging and loquacious soap. It is light entertainment, but never quite frothy. It is happy, but pulls back, in its final episodes, from any suggestion of the everafter. And, unlike so many other soaps, is never boring. Which is why, of course, it has run and run, but never dribbled away.