Victoria Loustalot reading/signing new memoir 'Future Perfect' - February 5th

Time Tested Books
is pleased to present

Victoria Loustalot
reading / signing / Q&A

Future Perfect:
A Skeptic's Journey into the Fact,
Fiction, and Fraud of Mystics
Tuesday, February 5th, 7:00pm

“2017 was a year of trauma, a fact that sometimes feels like the only thing left uniting us,” writes Victoria Loustalot in Future Perfect: A Skeptic’s Search for an Honest Mystic. As Victoria struggled to find purpose and meaning in a year that offered mass shootings, terrorist attacks, #MeToo, Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria, devastating fires, racial unrest, and seemingly endless political chaos, she began to question everything, and search for answers in the most unexpected of places. FUTURE PERFECT asks questions that we all ponder, and finds answers that are anything but straightforward.

Victoria’s very personal journey begins with the breakup of a long-term relationship, and her search—at a psychic’s urging—to find her own Prince Harry. When she thinks she’s found that new love, she wonders if it’s for real or too good to be true—and if so, how would she know? As her skeptical eye wonders what she’s possibly missed and what she has yet to see, she discovers herself along the way, aided by a motley crew of psychics, astrologers, and shamans.

Bit by bit, Victoria peels back the layers of mysticism, interviewing a New Jersey teen who “sees dead people,” an astrological poet in Indonesia, a psychic in Montreal, a Hawaiian empath-intuitive, and a potentially clairvoyant grandmother in California, among others. She visits a tacky tourist trap/voodoo museum in New Orleans, takes a virtual class in astrology, befriends an oracle card designer in lower Manhattan, and meditates with an empath-intuitive named Maureen Bright Healer, all while bringing readers down the rabbit hole with her to discover what’s real and what’s not, and why it matters.  

Victoria muses: “If psychic ability is pure conjecture, mere coincidence, does that mean it is also without value? If it is fake, does that mean it is also full of harm? If it is real, does its truth necessitate that it is also valuable?” She wonders who we are, why we are here, and why, whether we believe in them or not, we need psychics, astrologers, and shamans.


Victoria Loustalot (pronounced LOO-STA-LOW) has written for the New York Times, the New Yorker online, the Onion, Women’s Wear Daily, and Publishers Weekly, among many other publications. Her writing has been acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Thomas J. Watson Library and Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. She earned her BA and her MFA from Columbia University in New York and worked at Twitter as the global program manager for @TwitterMoments. She is the author of the memoir This is How You Say Goodbye and Living Like Audrey, a meditation on the life and career of Audrey Hepburn. In the future, according to one psychic, she will call the Scottish countryside home. Another claims she will move to Hawaii. Loustalot is dubiously unopposed to both. For now, she lives in New York City, and can be found at www.victorialoustalot.com.



Praise for FUTURE PERFECT:
“You’re not the only one who buys crystals and reads your horoscope and has maybe seen a medium just for fun but also because you were seeking guidance in your life and found it in a stranger who made your arm hair stand up. There’s a reason (several reasons?) why we’re all out there, cobbling together our own belief systems. It’s easy to be snarky or skeptical about the things that people have faith in, especially when that thing is a piece of rose quartz they bought at a strip mall. But Victoria isn’t snarky or belittling, because Victoria, like all of us rubbing our crystals while meditating, is also a seeker. And she’s also a very smart writer, who explores how we all got to this place, where mysticism is mainstream and people are more likely to go see their intuitive healer than their doctor (if they even have one).” —Nora Purmot, creator and host of the podcast Terrible, Thanks For Asking and the author of It’s Okay to Laugh and No Happy Endings

“This book is not what you think it is. What this book is is Victoria Loustalot reaching into my mind and sorting out my eternal struggles. Here’s the thing: as much as it pains me to say so, my struggles are not all that unique. I wonder about my future, I ponder the mysteries and beauties and great pains of love, I wonder what’s out there that might be greater than me. In navigating the realms of psychics and healers with a skeptic’s eye and an open heart, Loustalot moves toward meaning in a way that is deeply resonant.” —Elizabeth Crane, author of We Only Know So Much and The History of Great Things

“Writing from an anxious, impatient, image-driven, data- and option-overloaded generation, Victoria Loustalot looks at our longings and the sources from whom we seek answers. Future Perfect is about the psychics and mystics we either adore or are skeptical about, and the science that supports or debunks their syntheses and claims. But this book is also about us—thirtysomethings, women, memoirists, Instagrammers—what we yearn for, why we search, how badly we want to be found. In reading about Loustalot’s journey, in research and in life, we might just feel a little less lost and a little less alone, and that the future, while imperfect, can be a breeding ground for magic and kindness and empathy. Whether she embraces the scientific or the spiritual, in the end, and certainly evermore, Loustalot embraces herself.” —Cinelle Barnes, author of Monsoon Mansion: A Memoir



This event is FREE & all are welcome