Happy Birthday, Heretic

book birth chart included, & a bit on the scorpio eclipse

Hi friends,

Happy Scorpio Eclipse! And happy birthday to Heretic, my debut memoir, available today wherever books are sold (ebook & audio also available). 

Heretic is a triple Scorpio: a sun/moon/rising, with Venus in Scorpio in the first. Books' birth charts are often indicative of their tenor and, well — this is certainly a book about bringing society's abject into the light, about reckoning with the rot within in order to bring about healing transformation. Scorpio isn't afraid of the dark, of the unknown, of what others try to shame into silence. 

Of heresy, one could say.

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I so appreciate all y’all’s support through this process, and I do hope to see you, if not at one of the in-person events, then online: tonight’s Books Are Magic launch will be live streamed on YouTube here, and I have a virtual event hosted by Bluestockings with my dear friend Lilly Dancyger next Tuesday, Nov 1 at 7p Eastern, which you can register for here (free, but registration is required).

Some very exciting things have come out, and a few more are coming down the pipe (starts with “new” and ends with “yorker”), and I wanted to share them, if you’re interested:

• One of my absolute favorite things I’ve written in a long time: an essay on the relationship between art and life (what some of you might know as mimetic theory), as it pertains to memoir and reality television, specifically the Bachelor franchise, for Catapult.

• Interviews in The Cut, Shondaland, and Poets & Writers!

• A gorgeous review in Autostraddle from Heather Hogan, who, noting the 1- and 2-star Goodreads swarm Heretic has received, writes:

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As y’all likely know, today’s eclipse is that of a new moon — something beginning — but also occurring with the south node: something being flushed out. A necessary ending to a cycle. In that way that Scorpio season and archetypes so often transmute and alchemize, this is a fitting and powerful time for those things in life that usher in one chapter and close another.

This can be a time for loss. It can also be a time for celebration. Wherever you are: alchemy is the word of the the season.

We are not static creatures. We were not meant to be.

Happy Scorpio eclipse, and happy heresy,

Jeanna