The glorious Olympia Dukakis, due to be awarded with her Hollywood Walk of Fame star as I write this, was born to play her. Could any actress possibly play this woman? I was surely destined to be disappointed. The stakes were high, therefore, when I first saw the Channel 4 TV series. Her courage, warmth and humour (and taping of joints onto new tenants’ doors) have inspired and delighted in equal measure ever since. For me, it started, understandably, with Alice, Pooh and the Famous Five, but, in my teenage years, I graduated onto Hamlet, Pip, Elizabeth Bennett, Heathcliff, Leopold Bloom, Huck Finn and many others.īut it was later in life, when I discovered the Tales of the City series of books by Armistead Maupin, that I met the most attractive and extraordinary character of them all – Anna Madrigal, the green fingered-transgender landlady of the “crumbling, ivy-entwined relic” called 28 Barbary Lane on Russian Hill in San Francisco. With Brian and his beat-up RV, she journeys into the dusty troubled heart of her Depression childhood to unearth a lifetime of secrets and dreams and attend to unfinished business she has long avoided.As children, we develop strong affinities with certain characters from the books we read, sometimes because we can relate to their experiences, but more often because they fire our young imaginations.

Anna herself has another destination in mind: a lonely stretch of road outside of Winnemucca where the 16-year-old boy she once was ran away from the whorehouse he called home. Some members of Anna’s family are bound for the otherworldly landscape of Burning Man, the art community in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert where 60,000 revelers gather to construct a city designed to last only one week. Anna Madrigal has seemingly found peace with her “logical family” in San Francisco: her devoted young caretaker Jake Greenleaf her former tenant Brian Hawkins and his daughter Shawna and Michael Tolliver and Mary Ann Singleton, who have known and loved Anna for nearly four decades. Now ninety-two, and committed to the notion of “leaving like a lady,” Mrs. Suspenseful, comic, and profoundly moving, The Days of Anna Madrigal follows one of modern literature’s most beloved and indelible characters-Anna Madrigal, the ninety-two-year-old transgender landlady of 28 Barbary Lane-as she embarks on a road trip that will take her deep into her complicated past

Mrs madrigal