Marian Keyes

Earth and air take four planets each here, leaving one in fire and one in water. Earth builds and air examines, and the two elements that would supply heat or sentiment are the two that are nearly missing. Keyes is an Irish novelist who writes about addiction and depression and does it with comedy, which is a combination that only works if neither half is softened to accommodate the other.

The Sun sits at seventeen degrees of Virgo with Venus, Uranus and Pluto in the sign as well, four planets inside fourteen degrees of the one that looks closely at the unglamorous thing and describes it exactly. The Moon answers from Gemini, which is quick and finds the joke first. Virgo supplies the unflinching accuracy and Gemini supplies the lightness, and a book that manages both at once needs them in exactly that order.

Two yods run through the chart and both hold Jupiter and Saturn, which sit in easy contact with each other at seven hundredths of a degree, the narrowest orb here. Expansion and limit agreeing completely, while jointly pointing at something that never resolves, is an unusual structure. The Sun is square the Moon at two fifths of a degree, so the accurate half and the funny half are in permanent friction. In a novelist whose subject is the worst thing that has happened to somebody and whose delivery is funny, that friction is the method rather than a problem with it.

Jupiter shut its lap in Aries on 26 March 2023, at fifty nine. Aries is the sign of whatever is begun, and the planet of reach returning there asks what was started rather than what was finished. Five laps of the planet precede it, and a readership that found her through one book and stayed for twenty is what that particular question was built to measure. Mercury, the planet of the writing itself, was retrograde when she was born, which puts the revising ahead of the saying.