In Follow the Signs (University of Iowa Press, May 2026), doctoral student Courtney Ann LaFaive keeps running into dead-ends as she tries to write her dissertation about one of her personal heroes, Linda Goodman, the first person to popularize astrology in the United States. Aside from her widely sold books, the enigmatic Goodman didn’t leave behind much of an archive, making LaFaive’s task of making her the subject of a biography nearly impossible.
But rather than abandon the project, LaFaive saw that biography might be too small a container for a larger-than-life character like Linda. In her desperate search for information about Linda, LaFaive leaves dozens of unanswered voicemails and emails for sources who may or may not be dead. Along the way, she begins to notice parallels between Goodman’s life and her own, especially in their shared experiences of grief. LaFaive starts to weave the story of her own divorce with biographical sketches of Linda Goodman, and the result is an innovative, hybrid book that blends memoir, biography, and at times, even fan fiction through the use of imagined dialogue and scenes.
I recently spoke with Courtney Ann LaFaive over Zoom about seeing a project through to completion despite research obstacles, how she developed a coherent narrative arc while weaving multiple narrative threads into the book, and whether she believed she succeeded at recuperating Goodman’s image.
Stephanie Jimenez: Follow the Signs grew from being a huge fan of the late astrologist Linda Goodman. Can you tell me about your love for astrology and how you became a Linda Goodman fan?
Courtney LaFaive: Linda Goodman was the woman who popularized astrology in the United States. For millennia, astrology has been really popular, but before Linda, it was wrapped in academic, obscure discourse that was often difficult for people to understand. I stumbled into my love of Linda Goodman decades after she was popular, but I was just so taken by the way she presented astrology, as a way that you could understand not only yourself, but also other people. She presented astrology as something that was almost utopian. It’s not necessarily about typecasting someone, but about seeking understanding. Like, this is what this particular person struggles with or what they value, and this is how they approach the world, and that can help me understand them more and have greater empathy for them.
SJ: The book describes your research process for writing your doctoral dissertation about Linda Goodman. Does the book mirror what you wrote in the dissertation, or did it feel like an entirely new product?
CL: I would say this is very close to my actual dissertation. I did my dissertation at UC Santa Cruz which is probably a bit similar to Asheville in terms of its community and in the way in which the institution itself is interested in breaking down barriers in what we see as traditional academia. It’s interested in interdisciplinarity. As I moved forward in the project, some parts of the book fell away that were in the initial dissertation. I wrote it over the course of six years, so there were parts of the process when I was a much younger writer and a little more experimental.
SJ: The book really does seem interdisciplinary. It’s a mix of different genres, blending biography, memoir, and sometimes what feels like fan fiction with the use of imagined scenes between you and Linda. From a craft perspective, I’m curious how you arrived at that hybrid.
CL: I arrived there in a moment of crisis. I really wanted to write a project about Linda Goodman, and I believed very strongly that she should be examined and written about in a critical way. But she’s a terrible biographical subject because she doesn’t have an archive. The archive we do have of her is an archive that lives in a fantasy land, and it can’t be verified in so many ways. I was probably not the best person to write this biography because I didn’t know her. I’m probably a little too young to write about her. If I had done this project 20 years ago, it would have been much easier because more people would have been alive. When I arrived, many people I tried to speak to had passed away. So on one hand, I really wanted to do this project and I was determined to do it, and at the same time I had so many obstacles.
It’s actually kind of funny that the biography was so difficult to write because she was a relatively famous woman. She sold millions of books. To me, the fact that she was so difficult to write about is a testament to how difficult it can be to write a biography, because there are lots of people who are not famous, who don’t have archives to work from, and who are also very difficult to write about.
SJ: Throughout the book, you keep coming up against these frustrating dead-ends. You can’t find enough archival material, or the person that you’re looking for is dead. But you continue to write the story. My question is about holding onto a project even when it no longer seems like there’s a story to tell. In terms of this book, how did you end up finding the story?
CL: I will be totally transparent. There were moments where I thought about quitting. I had a whole other dissertation project that I was thinking about. I would have meltdowns where I would take all the other essays I’d written during the past five years and was like, maybe I could put this together and that’s my dissertation. I don’t think I have a great answer for why I kept going besides the fact that I was really stubborn. But that brings up another really interesting point about biography, and it’s that we demand that narratives about our lives need to work in a certain way. And ultimately, Linda Goodman’s life was a tragedy. And so, it was a really challenging question to think, how do I make this into an arc that’s interesting for people? My agent, Mariah Stovall, said to me, “You have to acknowledge the fact that this isn’t a good story, and it doesn’t have a beautiful arc.” Ultimately, this was a woman who chased something and never found the thing that she was chasing."
SJ: There’s a trope that writers always have three or four unfinished manuscripts, or a whole desktop full of documents that they never end up finishing. Is that true for you? Or do you always stick to a project until it reveals its final form to you?
CL: It’s a little bit like baking a cake. I usually know initially if I have enough to cook it. With Linda Goodman, once I realized that the story I was telling was not me redeeming her, but me falling out of love with her, I realized that was the same story I was telling with my ex-husband. With other projects, I usually spend a lot of time assembling what I think the elements are going to be. So I’ve got the eggs, the milk, the butter. I’ll put it together, and this will bake at 350. But if I don’t have all the elements, I’ll just let it sit and if the butter shows up, or the sugar shows up, then I know, like, “Okay, I can whisk this together and bake it.” So, I do have a folder of things on my computer where I’m just waiting to see if the right ingredients or the right experience or the right theorist or whatever shows up to complete it.
SJ: There are multiple narratives happening simultaneously in the book. There’s the story of searching for Linda, as well as the story of your divorce, as well as the story of Linda’s life. How did you weave them all together?
CL: My process was really unsexy. I got a giant roll of butcher paper and I cut it and put it on my wall and I literally traced things beat by beat. I had one thread that was me and my ex-husband and it was like, “Okay, this is the arc of me and these are the actions. These are the reactions. This is the moment of crisis. This is the moment of resolution.” And then with Linda, I plotted out the points of her life on Post-it notes. And then in terms of my own narrative, I did the same thing. I put my own narrative looking for Linda on Post-it notes. I literally just kind of moved things around scene by scene to see what that arc was and how to toggle back between those things. The manuscript was a bit like Tetris, wondering how we fit all these different things together.
SJ: Going back to your use of imagined dialogue and scenes, were you worried that using those imagined scenes might undercut the reliability of your research?
CL: Creative nonfiction and biography are genres that are very concerned with where we are getting this information. Some writers would look at what I did and they would say, poo poo, that’s not what you’re supposed to do. I did initially feel some reservations about it, but I think what’s great about creative nonfiction is that even though it’s a genre that’s constrained by ethics, as long as you flag what you’re doing, you can do anything. What I chose to do was just name it. I’m imagining this. This is the source that I got this from. I know it’s from a message board. I know it’s from a psychic. I understand the fragility and the possible lack of veracity of the sources that I’m using, but I felt that if I laid out all the evidence, the reader then could do with it what they wanted, and I could also do with it what I wanted. I could say, I got this information from a message board and it seems kind of cuckoo, but also this was in People magazine and it also seems sort of cuckoo.
I think if Linda had been someone who wasn’t associated with astrology and the New Age, doing what I had done might have been even more suspect. But I felt like she trafficked in this world, and to know her is to engage with these sources as well.
SJ: I read some of Linda Goodman’s work after I read your book, and I really enjoyed her descriptions of the horoscope signs. As a writer, is there something about her writing that appeals to you? Or is it mostly the subject matter?
CL: I don’t know if I really think of myself as a writer who’s like Linda Goodman, but I really love her writing. In Love Signs and Sun Signs, she gives these little anecdotes about the signs and puts them into scenes. They’re quite dramatic, but they’re also so funny. I think she would have been a really great screenwriter or short story writer. She was just quite funny. I think people sometimes accuse pop astrology of being sort of totalizing and glossing over people, but I think she was able to capture the nuances and humanity of each sign. In the book, I talk about how my ex-husband was a Capricorn, and Linda has a really great scene between an Aries woman and a Capricorn man. What I love about the scene is that she shows how both of them are selfish and both of them are right. And that’s what makes their pairing so challenging. She was able to capture that complexity so beautifully.
SJ: In the book, you describe having to defend your dissertation topic to critical peers who didn’t understand why the topic was interesting or noteworthy. Did you face anything similar when you tried to publish the book?
CL: I did feel like I had to defend Linda. I think most boomers are like, “Oh yeah, I remember those books.” Even if they thought they were hogwash or stupid, they probably remember the books. But so many publishers just didn’t understand why this person is important. For me, it was so obvious. I was like, well, astrology is so popular now. This is the foremother to Chani Nicholas, to Jessica Lanyadoo. But it’s hard to get people to want to care about a person they’ve never cared about. I had to keep proving her relevance again and again, and I also think because she was an astrologer and because she did have some rather obscure beliefs, she’s very easy to write off. It’s also because her narrative is so unsatisfying and her archive is so spotty. Sometimes I would talk with publishers and they would say, “Well, what else do you have?” And I would say, “This is it.” Everything that’s in this book is every single thing I’ve ever found. They wanted more from her, and I just couldn’t give that.
SJ: Has this book taught you anything about writing about your heroes? Would you ever write about one of your heroes again?
CL: I probably would write about one of my heroes again. I think part of this process was that I had to make my own mistakes. One of the books that I read, a little bit of an older book, was a book about astrology. And in the book, the writer talks about how writing a biography is like falling out of love. You love your subject and then inevitably you discover things about them that will make you not love them anymore. And I was like, “Oh, that won’t happen to me.” Linda, who promoted love and harmony—how could I ever turn the rock over of her life and find something ugly? I just had to make that mistake. The cool thing about this project is that it showed me that everybody is complicated.
SJ: Do you still see your goal as recuperating Linda Goodman’s image? Do you want people to read your book as a way of discovering her work?
CL: I think both. Linda Goodman should be remembered as part of the canon when we think about pop astrology today. She did something really profound in the cultural zeitgeist that we are still benefiting from. I also think that Linda’s story is really important as a woman who had a very particular experience with grief, illusion, and deception. In our modern moment, as we grapple with AI and ChatGPT, we’re thinking about deception infiltrating lots of different areas of our lives. I think it’s very easy to look at Linda and to say, “Oh my gosh, she was such a kook. How could anyone believe these goofy things?” But ultimately, we are all on a daily basis having to say, “Did this really happen? Is this article that I’m reading written by a human? Is this image that I’m looking at real or was this generated by a nonhuman source?”
SJ: What are you working on next? When we were scheduling this interview, you mentioned you were just in Norway.
CL: My next project has nothing to do with astrology. I’m looking at the connections that we form between nonhuman animals and how those particular narratives help us to find solidarity and healing. For the past several years, I’ve been following the story of Hvaldimir, a whale that surfaced in far north Norway in 2019. He was wearing a harness with a St. Petersburg insignia. Russia, like the United States, has been known to train marine mammals to be used in military operations, so people thought this whale was used by Russia for some kind of military operation. So for the next five years, this whale lived off the coast of Norway, and it was this big question about what to do with the whale. There were many narratives that were put onto this whale. This whale is lonely. This whale is a hero. This whale is some kind of inspiration. This whale is a nuisance. So on and so forth. And so a few summers ago, I was able to go and meet him. I was just in Norway doing a bit more research about him.
SJ: What would you say unifies your work as an artist? What captivates your interest?
CL: I think what really unifies my work is a study of kinship. My first book was about my relationship with my mother. This book with Linda Goodman is about my relationship with my ex-husband and with Linda Goodman. And through that, an extension into what our relationship is to the cosmos. The project I’m doing next is about the kinship we have with animals. I also think it’s a contemplation of mystery, too. Of what we can understand or what we can verify. Ultimately, we have to surrender to never knowing.
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