Follow the Signs: Searching for Linda Goodman, America’s Forgotten Astrology Queen

In this head-spinning account, English literature scholar Lafaive (Daughter in Retrograde) dissects her own life alongside that of the author whose books popularized astrology in the 1960s. In 2001, at age 13, Lafaive discovered works by Linda Goodman (1925–1995) at her local library. She became obsessed, feverishly imagining Goodman as a mythic figure. At 24, following her mother’s death, Lafaive’s attachment to Goodman veered even further into magical thinking (“I... assembled items that I thought or knew Linda had owned to create a collection of fake relics”), and she embarked on a PhD with a plan to write a biography. Around the same time, Lafaive married the brilliant but self-loathing Buck, whose cruel intellect “was the rung I clung to” as she struggled in school, particularly as she was thwarted in her attempts to reach Goodman’s associates. As the narrative fluctuates between the author’s dysfunctional codependency with both Buck and Goodman, Lafaive gradually realizes that the woman she endlessly fantasized about likewise lived in a fantasy world: Goodman long maintained that both a romantic partner who left her and her daughter, who died by suicide, had “disappeared”—the latter as part of a government conspiracy involving “doubles.” Unsettled but undeterred, Lafaive forges ahead with a fantasized biography drawing on her own internal mythologizing. Manic, vulnerable, and strange, this taps into the uncanny underside of storytelling. (May)