Before Courtney Ann LaFaive chose astrologer Linda Goodman to be the subject of her new hybrid memoir, Follow the Signs: Searching for Linda Goodman, America’s Forgotten Astrology Queen (University of Iowa Press), Goodman helped LaFaive make sense of the world.

“I think astrology can give you a language for how to interpret your life that’s away from good-and-bad sort of binary thinking,” LaFaive tells Isthmus in advance of her June 23 appearance at A Room of One’s Own Bookstore. “It’s hard to hold life if you don’t have a framework for it.”

LaFaive, who was born and raised in Wisconsin (mostly in the Eau Claire and Chippewa Falls areas), first discovered Goodman at her public library at age 13. There she picked up Goodman’s 1968 New York Times bestseller, Linda Goodman’s Sun Signs, where the author writes about finding meaning in zodiac signs — during the 1960s and ‘70s. It was a time, LaFaive says, when asking a stranger “What’s your sign?” would’ve been highly unusual even then.

“She really was the entryway into people talking about astrology in a way that was colloquial and mainstream,” LaFaive says, calling Goodman “America’s first superstar astrologer.”

In LaFaive’s book, which is part biography, part literary criticism, and part memoir, she tries to revive Goodman's reputation. She feels Goodman has been forgotten in part because of the negative press surrounding her daughter’s 1973 death. Goodman refuted evidence that her daughter had committed suicide and continued to search for her daughter, who she believed was still alive. That episode “still mar[s] her legacy,” LaFaive writes.

Follow the Signs began as LaFaive’s dissertation in English at University of California-Santa Cruz. Despite advice from a member of her dissertation committee to drop the topic, LaFaive didn’t abandon Goodman.

After completing her doctorate in 2022, she didn’t feel the project was finished. She kept returning to it, eventually incorporating her own story. “This is a book about love and about my love for Linda Goodman,” says LaFaive. But, she adds, it’s also an exploration of what it means to love someone, to love yourself and knowing when to walk away from a relationship that is no longer working.

LaFaive now teaches English at the University of North Dakota, where she sees the classroom as a place for students to find their voice. For her, writing is “a way to make sense of what has happened to us, and also to work towards greater forgiveness and understanding of ourselves.”

“ Why else read stories unless we are really vulnerable? Those are the stories I wanna read, and so that's the story I tried to write.”

Follow the Signs has been receiving many positive reviews, including in the New Yorker. “ I'd really like people to take away that Linda was both brilliant and a real human being who suffered,” says LaFaive, “and that while it's so easy to look at her actions and to judge her she was ultimately a person who was in pain, and I hope we can remember her for her contributions, and for the ways in which she is very deeply human.”

LaFaive will be joined in conversation by author Candice Wuehle, whose novel Ultranatural was also recently published by the University of Iowa Press.