[2] Both his parents died when he was a child, his father in a car accident and his mother of cancer, and he was raised thereafter by relatives in Shreveport.
[6] In the book, he also came out as bisexual by orientation,[7] although he noted that for personal and religious reasons he had chosen to remain monogamously married to his wife rather than exploring his attractions to men.
[8] The following year he left The Globe and Mail to become a general arts and culture journalist for the National Post, remaining with that paper until 2001.
He was a freelance writer for a variety of publications in this era, until rejoining The Globe and Mail in 2008 as an architecture columnist.
[3] Mays died of a heart attack on September 16, 2016, in Toronto, just two weeks after having completing his second novel, The Occidental Hotel.