I have always pooh-poohed astrology, but late last year, after a conversation with a friend who had her birth chart made, and whose life it kind of changed, I searched around on the web for the astrologer she meant. I thought I found the guy she was talking about, but I didn’t; instead I found Jonathan Cainer.

Cainer is one of the U.K.’s most popular astrologers. He’s been publishing in mainstream newspapers and elsewhere for about twenty-five years (he’s fifty-four now and writes the Daily Mail’s astrology column). He first encountered astrology in 1977, but it wasn’t until five years later that he felt writing horoscopes might be part of his purpose. He maintains a popular website where which he gives daily, weekly, monthly, yearly and decade-long predictions, both written and spoken. He writes over 25,000 words a week, and is the author of several books on astrology.

I sort of got hooked and slowly my life began to feel like it was being led by his hand—something I’d never before experienced; a sensation at once comforting and kind of schizophrenic and scary. I found myself planning six months in advance for vague things I otherwise would hardly have imagined might happen. But his tone of warmth, wisdom, and kindness made it all seem okay; even helpful. I paid less attention to certain stresses and saw things that seemed negative in an optimistic, long-term light. I paid his site money and was right there with him every day.

I finally wanted to speak to him, to try to understand how he had managed to affect this in my life; this experience that was for me, in many ways, more intense than most other experiences of reading (like the experience of reading a novel), because the sensation of being spoken to personally, about how one should live, felt so relational. In some ways, I consider him a great artist, or at least capable of achieving what many artists dream of: altering the lives of the people they reach. We spoke one afternoon over Skype, he from his home in London. – Sheila Heti

THE BELIEVER: I wanted to start by saying I’ve been reading your horoscopes… not that long; since October of last year. But I came upon them kind of randomly—and I’m a Capricorn—and I heard your prediction for 2011, the year that had just passed. And it felt so amazingly accurate and wise and thoughtful and helpful, and I started looking at your forecasts every single day. The thing that surprised me so much about what you do is that you have such a great sense of narrative.

JONATHAN CAINER...