THE SATURN DIARIES

In this debut memoir, B recounts her cathartic journey into tarot.

As a teenager in small-town Pennsylvania, the author found solace in the occult sections of bookstores. It didn’t matter to her if her classmates and parents failed to understand the attraction: “They didn’t know that there was something magical about those books, something that made me feel like I belonged to something bigger than myself.” Although she set aside these arcane interests to pursue a career in fashion, her astrological “Saturn return”—the return of that planet to its place in the sky it inhabited when the author was born—coincided with the death of her best friend, the loss of her dream job, and the end of her six-year marriage. This combination of events led to a return of the occult in her life. After her first post-marriage relationship collapsed under the weight of a dozen unheeded warning signs, B, who was struggling with alcohol and pill addiction, began to question her own intuition. Her recovery coincided with a chance rediscovery of tarot, and the quest for deeper knowledge that once inspired her as a teenager became an unexpected asset in turning her life around. The memoir affects the trappings of esoterica, and each chapter concludes with either a spell or a recipe for a magic-infused potable, from a Transformation-tini to a Spicy Truth Serum (whose main ingredient is tequila). The book, however, is less a grimoire than it is a chatty book about navigating adulthood. B’s prose is often self-deprecating, but it also reminds readers that she’s trendy and fun: “I first met Addy and Erica at a burlesque bootcamp class….The workout garnered a lot of buzz due to its super sexy ads showing toned women doing squats in heels to Christina Aguilera remixes on Instagram and on the TVs in the back of cabs.” Overall, it’s an engaging read, especially for those who see tarot more as a self-help tool than as a window into the unseen.

A funny, confessional remembrance of finding redefinition in the cards.