They are what she calls her "logical family". Anna's unconventional clan consists of a group of people who share very little blood but a whole lot of history. The unofficial "family seat", as one character puts it, has been relocated to the Noe Valley household of Michael "Mouse" Tolliver and his husband, Ben.
Anna now lives with Jake, a young transgender carer, in a flat near the Castro district. Perhaps the most telling detail dropped into The Days of Anna Madrigal is the news that 28 Barbary Lane, the funky boarding house where, in the 1970s, Mrs Madrigal grew pot and played enigmatic but sagacious den mother to the four questing young people at the centre of the series, has been bought by wealthy "dot-commers" they have "made it look like a five-star B and B". In the nearly four decades since 1976, when Maupin first began writing his serialised fiction about life in San Francisco for a local newspaper, his long, twisty narrative has encompassed homophobia, Jonestown, Aids, cancer, divorce, Republicanism and many other shocks and disappointments, all without losing its essentially sunny spirit. If you've never read Tales of the City or the seven novels that come between it and The Days of Anna Madrigal, this is not the place to start, and if you have even the slightest hankering for freedom or capacity for joy, do yourself a favour and go and find the first book right now. What's more, most of the new novel, The Days of Anna Madrigal, takes place in Nevada at the annual Burning Man festival in the Black Rock Desert and in Winnemucca, the town where the title character, Anna (then Andy), grew up and now the destination of a pilgrimage she makes in her 93rd year.
I t's hard to determine which piece of news makes a more devastating javelin to the heart of San Franciscans: that Armistead Maupin has published the final book in his Tales of the City series or that the author, the literary embodiment of San Francisco's grand old hedonistic, bohemian spirit, has moved to Santa Fe.
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