Francoise Hardy’s Memoir Is Capricorn Wisdom Distilled

Remember that spate of French Women Know Everything books a few years ago? This memoir is the real deal. Francoise Hardy is a gifted singer/songwriter and has thrived throughout the years.  She was born in Nazi-occupied Paris and just earlier this year emerged from a coma that doctors thought would take her out of this world.

If you are interested in beautifully expressed philosophical meanderings about love, art, solitude (she says without a taste for it,  you will never know true freedom), beauty, music, and magic from a seasoned woman, this is for you. To me, it embodies Capricorn wisdom but in truth, Hardy’s core astrological signature is Mars, Uranus, and Midheaven in Gemini. She is a grounded Uranian.

“It has to be acknowledged that the more impossible love affairs are, the more they intensify the illusion that the individual on whom we have crystallized our needs and hopes is the only lovable person in the world, the only person we will ever love. The suffering this causes is quite real and can be as destructive as it is energizing. Although it was far from my main source of inspiration, I have often wondered if I would have been better off if I had been balanced enough to put satisfying my own needs ahead of satisfying those of my partners, rather than spending my life compensating for my ridiculous frustrations by creating songs.

I tell myself I may have been better off mooning about along with my guitar and my idealizations (which probably owed more to my needs than to what inspired them) then to following my attraction to its bitter end. This attraction was not one that could long stand up to reality and I squandered a lot of my time and energy pursuing it. But it is impossible to fight our unconscious mind. With the precision of the most sophisticated radar, it stubbornly guides toward that one individual whose flaws sufficiently complement our own, in order to actualize the problem that imprisons us until, by means of setbacks and suffering, we end up seeing it clearly enough to attempt to free ourselves from it.”

The Despair Of Monkeys And Other Trifles – A Memoir By Francoise Hardy 

I am just at the point of the memoirs now where she is in Rio, being taken to a  “Umbanda” or white magic session by her interpreter and buying an aquamarine necklace for Dionne Warwick. So anyway, I love this book and if you are a memoirs person or in need of some elder Capricorn wisdom, I recommend it.