In Defense of the Leo

Every Leo season, the internet produces the same damn person. She is loud and dramatic. She enters every room as if someone has already arranged the lighting. She demands attention, admiration, applause, and possibly a small parade. If she is not currently performing, it is only because she is preparing to perform later.

As a Leo, I recognize parts of this woman. I am not going to pretend I have never enjoyed being admired (though I’d say I’d rather be appreciated than admired). I published a book. I run a press. I send newsletters containing my own opinions. Clearly, I have made some peace with visibility, and those who know me well knew how god damn hard stepping into the light was for me (Douglas knows).

But the stereotype gets Leo wrong in the same way most stereotypes get people wrong. It mistakes the visible behavior for the private need beneath it. Leos don’t want attention; we want recognition. And those two things just aren’t the same.

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Attention means someone is looking. Recognition means someone sees what is actually there. The work. The loyalty. The fear underneath the confidence. The care underneath the control. The enormous, frequently inconvenient heart beneath whatever performance has been mistaken for vanity.

Leos are ruled by the sun, which is usually interpreted as a desire to occupy the center. But the sun does more than hold a position. It makes life possible. It warms. It exposes. It creates the conditions in which other things can grow. That is the Leo quality I recognize most: the instinct to make something live. I am far more concerned with shining light on others.

Sometimes that means art. Sometimes it means a business, a family, a garden, a friendship, a dinner table, or a book that would not exist if one stubborn person had not decided to keep believing in it. A Leo will pour herself into the thing she loves, often well past the point at which a reasonable person would have gone home.

This is admirable until it is not. Loyalty can become self-abandonment. Generosity can become unpaid labor. Protectiveness can become control. Fear of being vulnerable can make it nearly impossible to admit that something hurts. The Leo heart is large, but it is not always wise about where it places itself.

That’s the part people miss when they reduce Leo to confidence. Confidence is often the public architecture built around a private sensitivity. The performance is not necessarily false. It may simply be the form that courage takes when someone has decided to walk into the room despite knowing exactly how much it will hurt to be misunderstood there.

Women know something about the cost of visibility. A woman who speaks up is labeled as difficult. A woman who names her ambition and then pursues it is called self-important. A woman who stops performing care without reciprocation is selfish. We are permitted to work, but not always to make the work visible. We are permitted to hold everything together, but announcing that we are the ones holding it can be treated as a failure of humility.

There is a reason I keep returning to disappearance, self-editing, and erasure in my own work. Women are trained to vanish. Stay silent. We disappear into motherhood, partnership, emotional management, administrative labor, and the daily maintenance of other people’s lives. We are expected to make the machinery run without standing close enough to it for anyone to notice our hands.

Then, if we step forward and say, “I made this,” the room changes.

The Leo in me has never been especially good at pretending I did not make the thing. I have tried. I have softened my language or treated my accomplishments as “it was nothing” in conversation. I have worried that my confidence would make me unlikable, as though likability were the admission price for authority. Eventually, though, that all becomes its own kind of dishonesty, doesn’t it?

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This is why I wanted Unsolicited Press to celebrate Leo season with books, but not with crowns or jokes about needing attention. I wanted books with heart. Books that create warmth, tell family truths, love beyond reason, protect the vulnerable, invent new forms, and make something startling from what nearly destroyed them.

MOTHER! refuses the bargain that asks women to disappear inside the roles they sustain. The Things You Left understands that love survives in objects and absurd little fragments. My Monstrous Family Cookbook asks when loyalty becomes silence. The More You Hate Me builds courage inside grief rather than pretending grief has been conquered. Dream Pop Origami invents a form capacious enough for a complicated identity. Ventric[l]e enters the heart as both home and cage. How to Monetize Despair makes strange, funny art from devastation. Hope imagines warmth as a communal act. The Bugs takes protectiveness to its logical conclusion and considers replacing humanity on behalf of the planet.

These are not books about being the center of attention. They are books about having the nerve to remain visible inside your own life. That is the version of Leo I will always defend.

The person with the complicated pride and the ridiculous loyalty. The one who wants to be known rather than merely watched, and who keeps making light, not because she believes everything should revolve around her, but because she knows what happens when nobody tends the fire.

Leo season will end, but the work of becoming visible will not. Keep the heart. Keep the fire. Read something with a pulse.

Our Leo Season: Books with Heart collection is available through August 22. Choose any three featured books and save 15% with code LEO15. Every bundle order receives a limited-edition sticker while supplies last.

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