Happy Birthday, Elizabeth Gilbert!
Astrologizing The Snow Forest
Happy birthday, Elizabeth Gilbert! I’m sorry that people on the internet have been awful to you lately.
I never read Eat, Pray, Love, Gilbert’s most famous book, when it first came out in 2006. I think I was just a little too young to be interested at that time — much like I never got around to reading the Harry Potter books because I was just a little too old to be interested when they came out.
For the past month, though, I have been absolutely riveted by the drama over The Snow Forest, Gilbert’s forthcoming novel that she was recently cyberbullied into withdrawing. According to reviewers on Goodreads who had never read the novel in question, the novel was insensitive to the current Russo-Ukrainian War on the grounds that writing about a historical event that took place in Russia in 1936 somehow qualified as glorifying Russia.
If anyone has trouble understanding why I walked away from my own pursuit of fiction writing in 2016, this should dispel the confusion. No one ever canceled anything I wrote, but they didn’t need to — I saw enough of the way things were going that I figured I could be next if I stuck around.
Gilbert has an estimated net worth of $20 million, and she was cowed by these people. At the time I stopped trying to find a publisher for my novel in 2016, I was responsible for providing financial support to my parents. Given that I had others depending on me to provide a reliable income, I felt it was unethical to take the risk of finding out what could happen if I wound up on the wrong side of an emotionally inflamed mob high on the supply of their own self-righteousness.
I am gleeful with vindication that the forces of cancellation finally went after a big enough target to make the papers. They got away with their crap, and crap is exactly what it is, for years and years by primarily terrorizing small, obscure writers and merchants. Now, they are finally beginning to receive the scrutiny that they have had coming for a very long time.
Still, many of the papers are drawing the wrong lesson from all this.
The Free Press: “Eat, Pray, Cringe: Elizabeth Gilbert Cancels Herself”
Spiked: “By pulling the book, Gilbert is setting a bad precedent. . . . Ironically, by censoring herself, Gilbert is acting precisely like the authoritarian regimes she no doubt disapproves of.”
City Journal: “The subsequent widespread disapproval of Gilbert’s grand gesture was a gratifying moment of unison in our culture, like the cloud of toxic wildfire smoke that had lain over part of the country for days suddenly lifting.”
It’s always easier to condemn a victim of bullying who finally folds under the relentless brutality of their tormentor than to go after the actual tormentor, isn’t it?
Slate at least thinks about it a little: “Gilbert’s decision may be rash and pretty ridiculous, but anyone who has ever logged onto Goodreads knows how she got there.”
Even so, perhaps I’m just a little bit grateful to the good readers for being their insufferable selves — if they hadn’t scared me off, I might never have discovered that another line of work was a vastly superior match for my skills and interests! Since 2020, I’ve been a freelance writer specializing in astrology and related subjects. I’m a lot better at that than I ever was at fiction writing, so I’m generally not interested in looking back.
However, in fall 2022, my old novel that I abandoned in 2016 got revisited under bizarre circumstances. I felt pressured to publish it, but I still didn’t want to deal with the way the fiction writing world handles things. I therefore added a section of astrological content, stuffing the front of the book with enough complicated charts to scare away the sort of person who only opens books to look for trouble. Serious astrologers will find the discussion of persona charts informative, but no one will be able to start a stink about offensive content in Booby Prize: An Astrological Novel without first admitting that they read an astrology book! I’m still laughing at how I managed to make the social stigma against astrology work in my favor.
Could The Snow Forest similarly be rebooted as an astrological novel?
Spiked provides helpful background on The Snow Forest: “The Eat, Pray, Love author’s now-pulled novel is based on the true story of the Lykov family. The Lykovs spent more than 40 years living in the Siberian wilderness with little human contact, until their location was discovered by the Soviet authorities in the late 1970s. Gilbert claims she had been inspired to write the novel after isolating during Covid.”
In 2020, the planets Jupiter, Saturn, and Pluto were all clustered together late in the sign of Capricorn. Certainly everyone who lived through 2020 felt that intensity. However, some were more affected by it than others.
Gilbert’s birthday is today, July 18, so she’s got the Sun late in the sign of Cancer. During the pandemic, Jupiter, Saturn, and Pluto in Capricorn all opposed Gilbert’s Cancer Sun. She likely would be someone who was more affected by the intensity of 2020 than others.
Fortunately, Gilbert had an artistic outlet for all that intensity. It also makes wonderful astrological sense that she was drawn to the story of the Lykov family. According to Smithsonian Magazine, they began their exile in Siberia in 1936. Throughout 1936, Pluto was late in the sign of Cancer, close to Gilbert’s Cancer Sun — setting the stage for a powerful attraction to develop, although Gilbert was not born until 1969.
Just this cursory glance hints that an astrological preface for The Snow Forest would be possible if Gilbert wanted to pursue that. I finally started reading Eat, Pray, Love over the past month, and it’s engaging — The Snow Forest could easily become a better astrological novel than my Booby Prize. If the fiction writing community no longer cares to appreciate Gilbert as one of theirs, I think the astrology community would be happy to take her in.
Now that I’m having to think about my fiction writing years, I will admit that some of the people who were around me during that time got the worst of a particularly obnoxious phase I went through when I began to become articulate about my growing interest in astrology, and I am sorry for giving them astrological commentary that was unsolicited and unwanted. In the decade since then, the astrology community has grown in both numbers and maturity, and new astrologers are now receiving better guidance about boundaries than was the case when I was starting out.
Now that we astrologers have matured enough to carry on conversations without making things weird, we are currently going through a growth spurt of launching our own libraries and schools — and we wouldn’t mind having a multimillionaire around to help us fund those efforts!
What’s the correct birth chart for Elizabeth Gilbert?
Gilbert doesn’t appear to be in Astro-Databank, my preferred hoard of celebrity charts. Astrotheme has July 18, 1969, Waterbury, Connecticut, time unknown.
This chart with time unknown, hypothetically calculated for noon, has the Moon at 10° Virgo. However, when stuff hit the fan regarding The Snow Forest in mid-June 2023, Saturn was about to station retrograde at 7° Pisces. This makes me wonder if Gilbert was born earlier in the day with the Moon closer to 7° Virgo, because transiting Saturn opposite natal Moon would make sense for losing the approval of one’s public.
I also wonder about the area around 20° of the fixed signs for her Ascendant. Per Wikipedia, the book Eat, Pray, Love came out on February 16, 2006, and the movie version of Eat, Pray, Love came out on August 13, 2010. Furthermore, transiting Uranus is now around 20° Taurus, which could bring people with placements around 20° of the fixed signs into prominence.
I am not an expert in rectification, but here is my speculative chart for Elizabeth Gilbert at 7:45 am, Ascendant 20° Leo, Moon 8° Virgo.
Should all fiction books just be rebooted as astrology books to avoid getting canceled?
While rebooting as an astrology book worked for Booby Prize and theoretically could work for The Snow Forest, this approach wouldn’t necessarily be the right fit for every writer who just wants to write a novel without running into a buzz saw.
Fortunately, I have come up with a better idea that will make everyone happy — even the people who are happiest when they have something offensive to complain about! The idea is astrologically informed on my end, but I think people who don’t know anything about astrology would also see the wisdom in it. I was busy taking care of my mom’s garden while she was out of town recently (remember this detail — it will be relevant), so I haven’t had time to write it up yet. Stay tuned to this space.
When will paperback versions of Eva’s two astrology books be available?
Booby Prize: Now that I’m all riled up about the Elizabeth Gilbert drama, I’m tempted to add even more astrological content before I publish a paperback edition. We’ll see.
Impossible Dreams: I have a query pending with the Library of Congress to see if the book is eligible for a Preassigned Control Number. If the answer is no, I need to do a final proofread, adjust a couple of images, and then brave the uploading process. If the answer is yes, then we’ll have to wait a bit longer to get a Preassigned Control Number assigned.