cover image The Devil, the Lovers, and Me: My Life in Tarot

The Devil, the Lovers, and Me: My Life in Tarot

Kimberlee Auerbach, . . Dutton, $24.95 (279pp) ISBN 978-0-525-95021-9

A performance artist and former Fox News producer, Auerbach offers an earnest, though light memoir about learning to open herself to life through a first-time reading of the tarot cards. During a dark period of her life, when she felt stuck in her job after seven years, and stymied in a relationship with a loving man, Noah, who still wouldn't pop the question, the author, at 33, visited a clairvoyant in order to find out what the future held for her. Iris was not a typical tarot reader, but heavily into Kabbalah, and she navigated for Auerbach a reading of the 22 Major Arcana. The cards Auerbach drew included the Fool, the Wheel of Fortune, the Lovers and Temperance, and for each the author dwells literally on a chapter of her life, from being the dork back in grade school in Short Hills, N.J., to becoming the poster girl for her father's creation, Le Clic camera. Auerbach's parents were controlling (her father actually bought an engagement ring for Noah to give her), but she learned to forgive them. Iris was a kindly maternal figure who urged her to accept gracefully the natural cycles of one's life, but it's a simplistic lesson, and the answers too pat. (Aug.)