Object-ives #1: 'The Compleat Astrologer’s Sun-Signs Guide' Is My Most Treasured Book

Where I found faith for the clueless

Aug 15, 2025

the compleat astrologers sun signs book — This well-loved 1970s astrology book helped Leah Odze Epstein make sense of her identity during her childhood.

Growing up, I desperately wanted someone to tell me who I was. What I thought I was: half of everything, all of nothing. My mother was from Sweden. My father, the Bronx. She always ranted about “Tee-pee-kahl A-meer-eee-kahns” and how much better her country was than America. Was I American, or did I hate Americans?

We were middle class and nonreligious—my mother, a non-practicing Lutheran, my father, a lapsed Orthodox Jew. Our father told us we could choose what religion we wanted to be. But how would we choose if we didn’t know much about either one? Could someone please pick a religion for me?

My father’s religion was books, so I turned to books to tell me who I was. Our shelves at home were full of them. Specifically, self-help books. I think that’s why I was so ripe for the picking when, by some miracle, The Compleat Astrologer’s Sun-Signs Guide by Derek and Julia Parker landed in our house. The year it was published: 1973. I’m not sure exactly when it landed, but somewhere around the time I was nine. In fourth grade. 1975. The year my mother went to detox to get sober and I heard the word alcoholic for the first time.

My mother had AA’s Big Book. I had The Compleat Astrologer’s Sun Signs Guide. No one in my family explained what was happening. It just happened. My mother drank too much, my father traveled too much, and my older sister got suspended from middle school for smoking weed on school grounds. And me? I sat under the covers in my bedroom, reading and listening through the air vents for clues.

Luckily, before I had the astrology book, I found Body Language on my parents’ bookshelf, which helped me figure out the meaning behind what everyone was doing: My mother, staring out the window, smoking and drinking coffee with a frown on her face? Depression. My father, shrugging his shoulders and sitting on the toilet for hours? Defeat. My older sister, slamming her door? Defiance.

Why were we like this?

For that, I consulted The Compleat Astrologer’s Sun-Signs Guide. We were a Cancer (me), two Taureans (my father and sister) and a Sagittarius (my mother) living under the same roof. But what did that mean?

“At times [Cancer] can seem a very frightened mortal….the differences between his ‘family’ self and his ‘out-in-the-world’ self are quite astonishing.” (Sun-Signs, p.84)

At home, I liked to make my father laugh, and to sing along to K-Tel’s Greatest Hits. At school, if the teacher called on me, I hunched my shoulders up around my neck, face burning, and whispered an answer.

“It is sometimes the case that Cancerian children tend to want to stay at home rather more than their brothers and sisters…[they] tend to rely too heavily on the security and psychological protection of their own four walls.” (p.90)

I often pretended I was sick so I could stay home from school, avoiding the trips to the nurse for bloody noses and dizzy spells. My mother, who was a children’s nurse in her country, sprang to life when I wasn’t feeling well. It was the one time she paid attention to me, touching her lips to my face to see if I had a temperature, giving me a little bell to ring, placing a cool cloth on my forehead.

“Taurus is an earthy sign, dependable, firmly planted in reality.” (p.55)

That described my father—the one who kept the family together while my mother fell apart. When he wasn’t traveling, he woke me in the mornings, made me breakfast and packed my school lunch. At night, he read to me.

“It is essential for the Taurean to have security; not only financial security, but mental security as well.” (p.57)

Maybe that explained why my sister fell apart? Because what kind of security could anyone have with a mom who was either red-faced, smoking and cursing Americans, or sleeping off a “migraine” in a dark room?

“The Sagittarius mother may be faced with several quite serious problems. For her mental well-being she must first decide that she really wants a child. Once tied to a baby, the Sagittarius mother can become bored with the role…” (p.160)

“They ripped you out of me,” my mother said, when describing her Caesarean birth. When she wasn’t in bed with a migraine, she was staring out the window, as if she wished she were free.

Finally, I figured it out: I was one way, my father was another way, my mother and sister were still another way. (Had I figured it out? Hell, no. That was who we were. And you’re only one thing for a blink…)

I’ve carried The Compleat Astrologer’s Sun-Signs Guide with me from my childhood home to all my post-graduate apartments, to three houses and an apartment in the suburbs. It smells musty, like the 1970s, like a library. The pages are yellowed, with coffee stains, the red cover ripped. They will probably cremate me with this book—

Ashes to ashes. I’m half of everything. A lot of a lot of things. And that’s fine. Even if it turns to ash (or if I lose it), The Compleat Astrologer’s Sun-Signs Guide lives inside me, just like every other book I’ve read and every person I’ve met.

Who am I? I don’t need a book to tell me. I am my own crystal ball. Like a horoscope, or the position of the sun, moon and stars, the answer changes every day.

Still—I will always treasure my seventies sun signs book. Sometimes I want to pretend I’m not the kind of person who believes in astrology. Maybe it is silly. But I do believe. The Compleat Astrologer’s Sun Signs Guide is my version of faith.

Object-ives #1: 'The Compleat Astrologer’s Sun-Signs Guide' Is My Most Treasured Book

Where I found faith for the clueless

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