After nine books, published over the course of 36 years, these are old friends. Most of the original core characters in the Tales of the City books are about 8 years older than I, so I identify with the times of their lives, but I also experience them in the books as harbingers of my own destiny.
In "The Days of Anna Madrigal," Maupin gives these folks back to his readers with a warm hug and a sense of completeness. This is a particularly satisfying book for anyone who read the entire series, and a good book for the surviving members of the lgbt community of the 1970s and early 80s. From Anita, through the early years of AIDS to the possibility of marriage equality, this is a generation that dreamed and suffered in equal measure: there is satisfaction in having lived through that time, and in the validation that Maupin's Tales of City provides. These aren't reflections, but real-time accounting of life as we lived it.