It’s been a year since the publication of Claire Comstock-Gay’s book Madame Clairevoyant’s Guide to the Stars, and what a year it’s been. The relentless upheaval of the last year has intensified the need so many of us feel for methods of making meaning from madness, and for anchoring ourselves to a hopeful future. In her beloved column for The Cut, Madame Clairevoyant’s horoscopes walk a delicate line, offering predictions that are interpretively flexible, that are suggestions rather than declarations, and that open a reader’s day-to-day experience to new possibilities rather than closing readers into a sense of preordained inevitability. 

Typically, when interviewers approach astrology, they bring a lot of wide-eyed disbelief to the table: do you really believe this? Do you really think this works? But those questions don’t interest me. As a devoted reader of Madame Clairevoyant, my primary impression is one of technical mastery and literary artistry. I want to know how she trains her eyes not on the heavens, but on meaning-making, and I want to know how she charts not our futures but our relationships to ourselves. Instead of telling you what to believe, what to do, or what will happen, what sets Madame Clairevoyant apart is her well-honed ability to present an array which contains elements for readers to gravitate toward. She turns her readers into metaphysical metal-detectors: if you run your eyes over your horoscope, and something stands out or beeps for you, it’s probably because there’s something there for you to explore further. It’s a beautiful approach to the relationship between writer, reader, and the work itself.

I was lucky enough to catch Claire as she headed into the woods of Minnesota, and what followed was an eye-opening, inspiring conversation about astrology as an art form, and about imagining our own futures as a kind of fiction. 

-Yashwina

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Yashwina Canter: For the character of Madame Clairevoyant, what effect did you want to have upon readers and how did you develop that distinct voice?

Claire Comstock-Gay: Let me start by saying how grateful I am to be asked this! I think it’s the first time anyone has ever asked me about Madame Clairevoyant as a character. Just like there’s a critical tension between an autobiographical novelist and their first-person narrator, or a poet and the speaker of their poems, the Madame Clairevoyant voice both is and isn’t my “real” voice. In my experience, many people carry the implicit assumption that astrology writing can only be flat and straightforward, even naive. And a lot of astrology writing for general audiences is pretty straightforwardly informative, of course, and there’s nothing wrong with that, but that isn’t the only thing that astrology writing can do. When I started, mainstream astrology culture was a lot less robust than it is now, and most of the existing astrology writing that I could find was all practical advice that didn’t really match up with my life. What I was looking for was astrology writing that would make me feel something, and when I couldn’t find it, I set out to try to write it.  

YC: Despite its reputation as something woo-woo, astrology is pretty analytically rigorous — you have to juggle a lot of variables like planets and houses and signs and aspects. How does your other experience as a writer inform your process of assimilating and interpreting astrological figures? 

CCG: One of the loveliest things about astrology, to me, has always been the way it can expand and contract to meet your needs for it. It can be as simple and lighthearted as you want, but it also has a basically bottomless capacity for analysis and complexity. The drawback is that this makes it easy to get bogged down in details. If you’ve ever gone online to get one of the free, automated birth chart reports that some of the big astrology websites offer, you’ve probably experienced this. You enter your birth information, and get back this long list of details and interpretations, with no indication of which are most important, or of how the pieces fit together. There’s practically endless raw material in an astrological chart, and turning that into compelling writing means determining what’s important, directing your focus, cutting certain details that might be beautiful or interesting, but not necessary: all skills that are required, too, for condensing the raw material of life into fiction or poetry. (I imagine this is one of the reasons that there’s so much crossover between literary writers and astrologers, right now.) It’s not possible or desirable to create a totalizing structure that addresses every possible thing. The point is to prioritize and make choices, to let the story emerge. 

YC: I wonder if the reverse is also true — does your practice of coaxing narrative out of astrological phenomena inform your relationship to literary structure and storytelling more generally?

CCG: If literature helped me to make meaning from astrology’s bottomless complexity, then astrology’s great lesson is its resistance to any narrative that’s too smooth, too neat, too easy. For writers but also for humans in general, there’s often a tendency to latch onto a story that feels good, and then see everything in ways that fit into that story. But any astrological chart contains multiple possible interpretations, and also contains details that are inconvenient, if not totally contradictory, to the stories we want to tell. Astrology is wonderful at interrupting the stories we tell not because they’re entirely true, but because they’re easy or we’ve grown used to them. It isn’t possible to wish a planet into a less difficult sign, or an unpleasant aspect out of the sky: within the system of astrology, these things are just physical facts, and dealing honestly with the complexities of astrology can teach how to write honestly in other ways, too. 

YC: So much noise is made about how storytelling helps us relate to others and makes us more empathetic or whatever. How do you think astrology helps us relate to others, and how do you think it helps us relate to ourselves?

CCG: I’m glad you asked this—the notion that books are valuable because they teach us empathy gets under my skin so much, for so many reasons, not least of which is the fact that it’s clearly not even true. Book people aren’t naturally superior to any other kind of people! Shared love of reading and writing can’t insulate a community from violence or abuse or regular old nastiness—comforting as it is to imagine otherwise. All of this is true for astrology, too, as much as I’ve wanted at times to see it as an escape hatch from everything bad about the mainstream world. But Ronald and Nancy Reagan used astrology. Hitler used astrology. It can be put to all kinds of different purposes, just like any other tool. 

But it can really deeply help us relate to others and ourselves. The entire system is based on the simple premise that it’s normal and good for people to be different from one another. Put like this, it sounds too basic to even bother saying, but so much in our culture is based on the idea that there’s an ideal way to be a person that we should all be striving for, that we should all want the same basic things, all thrive in the same kind of environment. Astrology offers a framework for understanding that we’re all wired differently from each other, not because we’re defective but because that’s how it’s supposed to be. 

YC: What do you think makes certain readers feel resistant to or threatened by horoscopes?

CCG: Here are some of the reasons I’ve been given in the past: they don’t want to be told what to do, they don’t believe in anything unscientific, they’ve felt badly misunderstood by the horoscopes they’ve read, they think astrologers are delusional and/or grifters. There are a lot of reasons! And I get it! But whenever I hear someone hating on astrology, what they’re mad at is almost never astrology as a whole, but some specific piece of it: they think the memes are annoying, or they’re creeped out by the cis/heteronormativity that’s pervasive in a lot of the modern astrology classics, or they once met an “astrologer” who literally was a scammer, or their horrible ex used astrology as an excuse for some really bad behavior. Whatever it is, there are astrologers out there mad about that exact same thing. I could go through and correct each one of the weird and wrong assumptions people have about astrology, but what would be the point? Ultimately, it really is fine for it not to be for everyone. If you don’t like it, you don’t like it! 

YC: In your opinion, what is the best or most useful way to read one’s horoscope?

CCG: Practically speaking, it’s always good to read for both your sun and rising sign, if you know it. I also think it can be fruitful to pick one of two horoscopes that you like to read regularly over time, so that you can follow the ebbs and flows in a single astrologer’s interpretive style. More generally, I think it’s important not to take horoscopes too seriously. I recognize this can sound funny coming from me, as I take the writing of them very seriously. But it’s good to remember that astrologers aren’t your boss! They don’t even know you! Ideally, horoscopes can illuminate possibilities you hadn’t considered, or ask new questions, or affirm that you’ve been on the right track. We do our best to provide real and useful information, but we can’t know you better than you know yourself, and unlike with personal readings, horoscope columns are never going to apply equally well to everyone. Astrologers disagree with each other all the time; when it comes to your feelings and your life, you’re allowed to disagree, too. 

YC: Recently, in the shadowy place known as YA Twitter, there was some drama about readers demanding information from an author about a character so that they could read this character’s chart (and then turning vicious when that information was not forthcoming). What do you think about applying astrology to fiction and layering these modes of storytelling on top of each other?

CCG: Fortunately I was offline and missed all this drama, so I won’t comment on it directly. I will say that using astrology to talk about fictional characters is fun! Personally, I’m a hundred percent convinced that Frasier Crane is a Leo sun, etc. But this is necessarily going to be pretty limited, because fictional characters are not the same as human people! Unless the author is intentionally working with the astrology (Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries is a great example of this, and the astrology in Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead is great too), it’s hard to imagine what a randomly chosen birth chart is supposed to reveal. 

I also think people can forget sometimes that even though astrology looks out to space, it still operates here in our human world. It isn’t exempt from the rules of ethics and care and general decency. You really aren’t entitled to anyone else’s birth chart details—not fictional characters, and not real people, either.  

YC: Part of reading one’s horoscope is about seeking luck and hope — do you think that the last year and a half of a global pandemic has upped the ante for astrologers?

CCG: The ongoing challenge for me has been figuring out how to offer a moment of comfort or relief, in the context of unbearable grief and fear and change, in about a hundred words. Offering hope without any acknowledgment of the material realities of our lives feels hollow and unethical, but nobody wants or needs a horoscope that says “well, don’t know what to tell you, I’m scared and depressed too.” I’m still working on the balance. A few weeks ago I did a virtual event at Philly’s 215 Festival, with astrologers Alice Sparkly Kat and Cameron Allen, and tarot readers Jessica Dore and Gina Tomaine, and was interested to hear basically everyone talk about how the skill they’ve had to develop this past year wasn’t providing hope, but working with grief. 

YC: If you had your way, what would the future of astrology be?

CCG: I know some astrologers are troubled by the proliferation of chaotic amateur astro content on social media, but I love the sense of joy and freedom in a lot of that stuff, even when it’s wrong. If I could have one wish about the future of astrology, it would be that there’s no more astrology of stock market/crypto investing, because there’s no more stock market/cryptocurrency because the wealth has been redistributed and now we all have what we need.

Claire Comstock-Gay writes weekly horoscopes for New York Magazine’s The Cut and is the author of Madame Clairevoyant’s Guide to the Stars (Harper 4/21/2020). She lives in Minneapolis.