Stars aligned on the night of Sept. 13 at NeueHouse Hollywood when actress Anna Faris interviewed Natasha Sizlo, an estates agent at The Agency, about her new, magical memoir, All Signs Point to Paris: A Memoir of Love, Loss and Destiny (Mariner Books, $28.99). The two share much in common (Faris’ husband, cinematographer Michael Barrett, is Sizlo’s ex-husband) and spoke candidly about love, growth and the beauty of having a blended family.
Mariner Books
Sizlo’s book follows her experiences navigating grief and lost love — including her divorce, her father’s death and a passionate romance followed by heartbreak when reality set in — and how she found her way toward hope thanks to a life-changing astrology reading, which suggested her true soulmate could be found in Paris.
The astrologer Stephanie Jourdan, who guided her on her journey and who identified Sizlo’s “point of destiny,” which she discovered, poetically enough, was to tell a story, was present for the conversation. As was Sizlo’s best friend, who had gifted her the birth chart reading for her birthday.
Faris, whose first impression of Sizlo was that she was “intimidating, glamorous, totally fit and hysterical,” started the evening asking the author, a self-described former cynic, where her sense of romanticism came from.
“I was a late bloomer with love,” Sizlo said, adding that her parents raised her on old, romantic stories like The Philadelphia Story and Sabrina, which made her fall in love with familiar tropes like grand gestures, the damsel being rescued and happily ever after. “But a lot of these narratives don’t serve us.”
Faris, twice divorced (including from Chris Pratt) and now happily married, pressed on the concept of closure. “We seek and desire it but rarely obtain it,” she offered, asking the audience if they agreed or not. After both divorces, “I felt foreign to myself,” Faris said, noting that Sizlo found her true self in the wake of heartbreak. “You clung onto hope and optimism.”
Courtesy of NeueHouse
“I learned that grief is love,” Sizlo responded. “And the pain after a relationship is also love.”
During the conversation, Sizlo shared stories (which are present in the book) of her eventual trip to Paris, joined by her sister and best friend, in search of true love: the posters she plastered around the city, the Instagram account she created with targeted advertisements for people who fit her conditions (have November 2, 1968, as a birthday, based on her chart reading), her experiences Google translating messages on French Tinder.
Courtesy of Anita Pocsik
Faris — who next stars in the sister comedy The Estate opposite Toni Collette — called Sizlo’s sister, Tara, to join them onstage and asked her what she thought of the whole journey. Affectionately and wistfully, she said: “We were looking for signs and they were there.”
“For anybody out there who doesn’t have a sister, I hope this book is like a sister to them,” Sizlo said, as she recounted just how difficult navigating the final two weeks of their father’s life was together.
Sizlo also gushed over Faris throughout the evening, starting the conversation by telling her ex-husband’s new spouse: “I’m so grateful to have you in my life, and to have you in my book.” The feelings are mutual; during the pair’s chat, Faris complimented Sizlo on her parenting, her writing, her success as a real estate agent and more. (The actress is stepmother to Sizlo’s two kids with Barrett.)
Fittingly, Jourdan, the astrologer, helped close the night by superimposing Sizlo and Faris’ birth charts onto each other and identifying where they connect and align. She found that their friendship is deeply important to both of their lives and that Sizlo’s book, perhaps, is less about searching for romantic love, and more about the love of oneself, of a sister, of a father and of friends.
Sizlo bookended the intimate evening with a mysterious yet juicy spoiler that there is “exciting news on the horizon,” about adapting her memoir to the screen.
