Steve Braunias: my daughter has stars in her eyes - Linda Goodman's Love Signs

Linda Goodman's Love Signs - 'fabulous and compelling". Photo / Getty Images

Steve Braunias on his daughter's bedtime reading

She is reading her mother's copy of Love Signs by Linda Goodman. It's nice to see it back in the house. It was an almost permanent fixture on one side of the bed for the entire time we were together; one of the things I always loved about her was watching her delicate hands reaching in to browse titles in a bookstore, seeing her curled up with a book, filling her lovely head with the fabulous and compelling insights of Linda Goodman.

She is reading Love Signs in her bed at night time. You can chart your child's life by the books they read. It goes from the picture books of Baby Happy, Baby Sad and Fox's Socks ("Poor old Fox/ Has lost his socks") to the chapter books of Jacqueline Wilson and Roald Dahl to YA novels by John Green and Fleur Beale to adult literature by Jane Austen and Vladimir Nabokov – she read Lolita last year and marvelled at its language and wit. And now, at 13, the bedtime stories of Linda Goodman.

She is reading it from the beginning. Not many people do this, she says. They go straight to the chapters about their own star signs. But the beginning of the book tells you what the book is really about. I asked, "What's it really about?" She said, "Well – everything!" And then she went into the specifics, about its ideas of the holy trilogy, which is not the traditional masculine-only concept of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost; but man, woman, and the love between man and woman.

"Very heteronormative," she said, "but still." The love between man and woman is God. "Gee," I said. I liked walking along the street with her while she explained the theology of Linda Goodman.

She is reading one of the great classics of the 20th century. Its full title is Linda Goodman's Love Signs: A New Approach to the Human Heart, which gets to its profound and significant meaning. Goodman's enduring gift was to assess where we're at with each other. Naturally I crept into her room in the daytime and read where things are at with my Libran girlfriend: "It's hard to know what to predict," writes Goodman, maddeningly, of the Gemini-Libra love match. "But I'll risk it, and state that Gemini and Libra constitute a 5-9 Sun Sign Pattern which usually balances out favourably." Few authors have written a book so completely immersed in the mysteries of love and attraction as Linda Goodman.

She is reading a book by a genius driven insane. Goodman died at Penrose Hospital in Colorado Springs on October 21, 1995. She was 70 years old. Her obituary in the New York Times recorded her astonishing success, her height ("a five-feet-or-so dynamo"), her interests (numerology and reincarnation) and the central tragic event of her life: "When New York authorities ruled that her 18-year-old daughter, Sarah Snyder, had committed suicide in 1973, Mrs Goodman, citing her daughter's astrological chart among other evidence, refused to believe that the body identified by her husband was Sarah's. She later spent so much time trying to find her daughter that she was forever running out of money, at one point living for several months on the steps of St Patrick's Cathedral." Poor, crazy Linda Goodman.

She is reading a weighty masterpiece, over 1000

pages devoted to the intricate patterns of character, destiny, fate, and the cosmos. Freud initiated the science of human understanding; Goodman perfected it. Her thoughts on the positive characteristics of Gemini: "Mental alertness, quickness of perception, deductive reasoning." Too kind! On the negative characteristics: "Glibness, shallowness, double-talk, unreliability, self-deception." Who knows who we really are as intimately and accurately as Linda Goodman?

She is reading about her future. At 13, she has her love life ahead of her. She's going into it well-informed, a pretty Pisces sitting up in her narrow bed at night, the lantern-patterned curtains pulled, the bird mobile hanging from the ceiling, lip-gloss and hairclips on the dresser, filling her lovely head with the fabulous and compelling insights of Linda Goodman.