It would be easy to think of Goodman, who lived out her last years as a recluse in the Colorado mountains, as just another caftaned kook who’d spent too much time at altitude. Or, less kindly, to paint her as a savvy opportunist who made millions from hawking a woo-woo fad, and whose teachings, once fairly benign, became increasingly dangerous over time. But Goodman’s story is far stranger, and more significant, than that of a dippy mystic or a metaphysical scam artist. Born in a humble West Virginia mining town, she helped to push astrology, once a niche interest, into the center of the Zeitgeist. Her books sold upward of thirty million copies while she was alive, becoming fixtures on coffee tables and nightstands. Before “Linda Goodman’s Sun Signs” emerged, discussions of the zodiac were confined to fringe scenes and scant newspaper columns; by the mid-seventies, a person might casually bring up her sign during a first date or a dinner party. Goodman, with her friendly, approachable writing style, demystified what had previously been a wonky, mathematical discipline, allowing even casual readers to feel a newfound connection with the tides of the universe. The cost was that she became trapped in a bizarre private cosmos of her own making.

Goodman didn’t live forever, but she got the next best thing: a passionate biographer. “Follow the Signs: Searching for Linda Goodman, America’s Forgotten Astrology Queen” (University of Iowa Press), by Courtney Ann LaFaive, an assistant professor of English at the University of North Dakota, is a pensive, often sublime book that isn’t a dutiful work of scholarship so much as an adventure tale, blending fiction, criticism, and memoir. LaFaive is quick to note that she did not arrive at her subject neutrally. She first discovered “Linda Goodman’s Sun Signs” in 2001, when she was thirteen and browsing the stacks of the public library in her rural Wisconsin home town. LaFaive, like Goodman, was born in April, and she describes being instantly intoxicated by Goodman’s description of an Aries:

The Aries girl will open her own doors. She’ll also put on her own coat, fight her own battles, pull out her own chair, hail her taxi and light her cigarette without any masculine help. . . . Scarlett O’Hara is the very epitome of the Mars-ruled Aries female. . . . Both the O’Hara and the Aries characters are tough enough to defy convention, face an advancing army, or even shoot a man through the head with icy calmness, if he threatens her loved ones.

“I had no cigarettes to smoke or taxis to hail,” LaFaive writes. “I had no idea who Scarlett O’Hara was . . . but I was, indeed, alone and friendless. Linda’s words strummed the truth of my being. This is who I am. . . . If I had any battles to fight or coats to put on, even at thirteen, I most certainly would’ve done so myself. I kept reading.”

Here is astrology’s allure: the feeling, at once comforting and enlivening, that your idiosyncrasies can be traced to forces far greater than yourself. The young LaFaive quickly became a Goodman completist; after reading “Sun Signs,” she picked up “Linda Goodman’s Love Signs,” from 1978, a mega-successful, nearly twelve-hundred-page tome that explores the dynamics of every possible partnership in the zodiac. Both books are fixed in their time—Goodman writes only about heterosexual relationships, and she includes observations about what signs make the best and worst housewives. (“Sagittarius girls are acutely bored by the confinement of dusting and mopping.”) If LaFaive recognized such flaws, they did not dampen her enthusiasm. She dragged Goodman’s books with her to college, where her friends groaned when she quoted her favorite passages. This dismissal, LaFaive writes, made her feel even more certain about her devotion. “Astrology embraces the irrational,” she writes. “It accepts nonlinearity: life moving in a cyclical fashion. It values vulnerability: studying the skies to become intimately aware of a person’s gifts and challenges. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been so surprised when I encountered resistance toward my literary love.”

It’s dangerous to write a biography from a place of adoration. LaFaive begins her project with a zealous mission: to restore Goodman’s title as the foremother of American astrology. Early in the book, she describes proposing Goodman as a dissertation topic in graduate school, and gatekeepers of grants and fellowships, who called the subject both frivolous and thin, pointing out that LaFaive had few source materials at her disposal. Goodman had produced piles of published work, but she hadn’t left behind any known diaries or an archive of her correspondence. Astrology, a pursuit that hovers in the nebulous space between science and storytelling, is not exactly a robust academic field, and LaFaive had no scholarly studies of Goodman’s life or work to consult.

Still, she pressed on. LaFaive felt that Goodman had been fundamentally mistreated, particularly in the wake of a defining tragedy. In 1973, Goodman’s twenty-one-year-old daughter, Sally, was found dead in her apartment, in Manhattan. The police deemed it a suicide, but Goodman refused to accept the ruling—or even the fact that Sally was gone at all. Instead, she consulted Sally’s birth chart and concluded that somewhere, somehow, her daughter was still alive. The resulting press—which painted Goodman as an unstable oddball, unable to accept her daughter’s mortality—made her an ideal candidate for “a feminist revisionist biography,” LaFaive writes. “I felt I understood why Linda was maligned,” she adds. “She existed at the crux of the occult and mourning, a space doubly subject to patriarchal judgment.” It was only after LaFaive set out to prove this theory that she began to question whether the problem was not the story swirling around Goodman but Goodman herself.

Goodman was born Mary Alice Kemery in Morgantown, West Virginia, on April 9, 1925. (The date was finally confirmed by a data collector who claims to have found her birth certificate.) There is little information about her childhood, and what there is comes from an unreliable source: Goodman’s penultimate book, a thousand-plus-page quasi-autobiography that she published, in 1989, with the preposterously goofy title of “Gooberz.” In “Gooberz,” which is written in haphazard poetic verse, she describes her parents frequently being out of town, and her staying with a neighboring Black couple named Bob and Grace Carpenter, from whom she first gleaned a mystical education. Grace, she writes, told “perfectly marvelous faerie stories / while she bustled around, getting breakfast / . . . she and Bob believed in druids too, like me.” Goodman was raised Catholic, but her faith wavered after an early cascade of losses: first, her beloved grandmother died, then a close friend, and then her prized cat. One day, after watching a local boy squish a colony of ants, she had a feeling of despair that she describes as “the dreadful dilemma / of my struggle to make Life and Death rhyme.”

In her twenties, Goodman married a man named William Snyder, a union that was soon marked by calamity. Goodman miscarried multiple times, and lost at least one child in infancy. She and Snyder ultimately had two healthy children, but the relationship fractured and they separated. Not long afterward, Snyder died—the cause, according to “Gooberz,” was alcoholism and pneumonia—and Goodman, suddenly a young single mother, struggled to make sense of her situation. “Why do I still hope—why?” she writes. “When people die, they die / why, oh, why can’t I realize that? / I believe it—I know it / but why can’t I . . . realize it?”

In LaFaive’s telling, it was Goodman’s inability to reconcile life and death which helped her excel in her breakthrough job, as the host of a radio program called “Love Letters from Linda.” (This appears to be when she changed her first name.) On the show, LaFaive writes, Goodman read letters from soldiers stationed abroad during wartime, many of whom expressed anxiety about ever seeing their loved ones again. Goodman likely had a knack for soothing her listeners—she had a mesmerizing voice, low-pitched and lilting—and assuring them that their desired reunions were imminent. “This talent of hers,” LaFaive writes, “injecting hope into the most fraught possibilities, of convincing those who have been separated by dissonance or distance that they can be brought back together again—would make her celebrated.”

During her time as a radio host, Goodman met her second husband, Sam Goodman, “a onetime disc jockey and carnival comic,” according to an article in People, and together they moved to New York City, where Goodman had two more children. Sometime in the mid-sixties, Sam brought home a coffee-table book about astrology, and Linda became consumed by it, launching into a self-education that approached mania. “I think she stayed in a nightgown studying astrology twenty hours a day for a year,” her husband later told People.

Goodman taught herself how to make detailed astrological charts, which, in the decades before the internet, involved labor-intensive hand calculations to determine planetary movements. She began offering her services to acquaintances in Manhattan, and word spread. In 1969, a Miami News report cited her exorbitantly expensive rates—up to a thousand dollars for a single birth-chart analysis. Hoping to share her knowledge more widely (and, presumably, to find a more efficient way of earning income), Goodman turned to writing. She put out “Linda Goodman’s Sun Signs” with a small publisher, asserting that you could learn “up to ninety percent” about a person simply by knowing her sun sign. Goodman described each in a bold, conspiratorial tone: “Taureans would rather entertain hospitably at home than go to the trouble of visiting. The effort required for scintillating popularity doesn’t appeal to the bull’s nature”; “Leo, the person, rules you and everybody else. (Yes, yes, I know he really doesn’t. But please don’t tell him. It would break his big, warm, egotistical heart.)”

The enormous success of “Sun Signs” was, in part, a matter of good timing. By the late sixties, the average person was increasingly exposed to the outer realms of both consciousness and the known universe. (In 1968, a few months after Goodman’s book hit shelves, NASA sent the first manned crew to orbit the moon.) Astrology, an ancient divination practice that has its roots in Mesopotamia and was considered an academic vocation until the eighteenth century, has experienced swells of popularity over the ages, but none so pronounced as the explosion during the sixties and seventies, when horoscopes crossed fully into the mainstream. Betty Crocker published a recipe for an “Age of Aquarius” cake. Yves Saint Laurent designed a cocktail dress printed with astrological symbols. Even a serial killer adopted the Zodiac as his moniker. By 1975, the trend was so widespread that a group of more than a hundred leading scientists, including eighteen Nobel Prize winners, signed an open letter titled “Objections to Astrology,” in which they expressed exasperated concern. “We must all face the world,” the letter read, “and we must realize that our futures lie in ourselves, and not in the stars.” Notably, one scientist who refused to sign the letter was the astronomer Carl Sagan—“not because I thought astrology has any validity,” he wrote, “but because I felt (and still feel) that the tone of the statement was authoritarian.”

“Sun Signs” made Goodman famous, and she altered her life accordingly. She separated from Sam and decided to move to Cripple Creek, Colorado, a former gold-rush town that had become known as one of the West’s most haunted locales. She settled down among old brothels and saloons and started to write her next book. Then she got the call about Sally, and her world collapsed.

LaFaive’s book really takes off when she starts writing about Sally’s death. The police allegedly found an eight-page note and a bottle of barbiturates at Sally’s side, and Sam identified his stepdaughter’s body. Still, Goodman flew to Manhattan not to mourn Sally but to look for her. She had dreamed that her daughter was alive, and took it as a sign. The Times later reported that Goodman was so frantic that she hung around New York in a daze for weeks, sleeping on the steps of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. She begged N.Y.P.D. detectives to take her seriously, insisting that someone had replaced Sally’s body with a double. Here, LaFaive deploys a bold technique, inhabiting Goodman’s perspective at the moment of crisis:

She tells them about everything we already know . . . her intuition, and the natal chart. And, sure, that’s all a little kooky to a bunch of police officers, but they’re nodding along, trying to appear sympathetic, because, again, her daughter is dead. She’s distraught. Then, Linda pauses and delivers her bombshell evidence: Officers, I dreamt of my Sally. I saw her in my dreams—I know she’s alive. I saw her. Felt her. Did they write down the word dreams? Say, Tell us more, Linda. What exactly did you dream of? Grab her hands and say, Oh, sweet-heart. . . . Certainly not. When I imagine Linda saying those words, all I can see are their faces crinkling and their bellies jiggling.

As LaFaive digs deeper into Goodman’s story, though, she finds herself increasingly unable to comprehend Goodman’s motivations, and so she turns to others for answers. She contacts members of Lindaland, a small but lively online forum where dozens of Goodman devotees engage in close readings of “Gooberz” and discussion of past lives. She travels to Cripple Creek, to commune with Goodman’s old house and meet her acquaintances. People seem oddly frightened to talk about Goodman, as if she were still alive and listening, but LaFaive finally has a breakthrough when she contacts a man whom she calls Albert Bodin, in Maine. Sally, an actress, had spent her last summer living in Bodin’s farmhouse while performing at a local theatre, and, seven years after Sally’s death, Goodman called Bodin to ask for his help in finding her. At first, he happily obliged—if there was any chance that Sally was still alive, he wanted to lend a hand—but the situation quickly turned disturbing. According to Bodin, Goodman brought along an alleged former C.I.A. agent named David, and, after months of meeting with Bodin and his family, the two ultimately threatened to harm him if he refused to disclose the names of the people who’d worked with Sally that summer. Bodin survived the ordeal but was left shaken and scared, certain that he’d narrowly escaped a worse fate.

At this point, LaFaive’s narrative begins to splinter. Although eager for evidence that Goodman was wronged—the victim of a misogynistic media that wanted to undermine both astrology and the woman who made it popular—she comes to see that her subject is more than a mere vector for an argument. In Goodman’s hurt, she hurt others. LaFaive grows angry, imagining herself barging into Goodman’s house in Cripple Creek: “I want to find Linda sitting at her kitchen table, a Newport smoldering between her fingers, as she reads the morning paper in a terry-cloth robe. . . . I want to walk up to her, bat the newspaper away, look her square in the teeth and say, What the hell are you doing?”

In many ways, LaFaive’s book becomes more thrilling when she surrenders to the possibility that she is writing not a eulogy but a portrait of one woman’s many contradictory selves. The obsessiveness that spurred Goodman’s success—she sold the paperback rights for “Linda Goodman’s Love Signs,” from 1978, for $2.25 million, at the time the highest sum ever for a nonfiction book—is the same quality that kept her searching for her daughter. She was rich, but almost comically uninterested in material wealth (she apparently gave away most of her earnings); she was prolific, but much of her work was opaque and borderline nonsensical (even LaFaive admits that, for years, she couldn’t finish “Gooberz”). What LaFaive finds, looking clearly at Goodman, is not enlightenment but a kind of radical empathy. She begins to weave her own story into the book—LaFaive married an unstable man, and she writes through the heartbreak of her divorce—and, in so doing, earns a deeper understanding of Goodman, not as an all-knowing guru but as a flawed human being, looking to the skies for what to do next.

We may be in the middle of a new astrology boom. A 2025 Pew Research survey revealed that thirty per cent of adults “consult astrology (or a horoscope), tarot cards, or a fortune teller at least once a year,” and astrology influencers seem to pop up daily on TikTok. Both astrology and biography attempt to wrestle something infinitely complex—be it a human life or the heavens—into order. But perhaps the only thing we know for sure is how vast the universe is, and how boundless our yearning. At the end of her book, LaFaive admits that she has written a “failed biography,” insofar as she was unable to present a grand, unified theory of Goodman. To my mind, though, she succeeds because she accepts what she can’t know, the truths that not even the stars can explain. ♦