Ten years ago,Claire Dederer threw out her back while breastfeeding her baby daughter. Told to try yoga by evreyone from the woman behind the counter in the co-op to the homeless guy on the corner, she overcame her doubts and signed up for her first class. And she fell madly in love.

Over the next decade, Dederer would tackle poses such as lotus, wheel, and the dreaded crow. She became fast friends with some of them, while others provoked long-standing feuds.

It wasn't just her back that was demanding Dederer do something differently. On the surface, life at home looked pretty idyllic. But she found herself thinking more and more about the forces that had shaped her generation.They were children of the 1970s-their mothers had run away to find themselves and handn't been afraid to make a few messes along the way. The daughters, as a result, grew up determined to be good, good, good. They would buy organic, create an enriching home environment, and make their own baby food-even if it meant feeling hemmed in by an anxiously conscientious little world. Yoga seemed do fit right into this program.

To her surprise, Dederer found that the poses weren't just acrobatic feats (though they were that, too). The deeper she explored them, the more they tested her most basic ideas of what makes a good mother, daughter, friend, wife. Sudddenly, headstand was a way to wrestle with anxieties she had always dodged, jump-through helped her understand her mother's flight (and, maybe, her own pursuit of freedom), and the dreaded crow reminded her that losing one's balance could be worth a great deal more than keeping both feet on the ground.

As Dederer's practice deepened, the poses that once seemed so daunting now pushed her toward a life that was a little more improvisational-and a little less tidy. Witty and heartfelt, sharp an irrverent, Poser is the story of Dederer's discovery that what she needed most of all was less goodness-and more joy.

Claire Dederer's essays, criticism, and reporting have appeared in Vogue, The New York Times, Slate, Yoga Journal, Real Simple, and The Nation. She lives on an island near Seattle.

'Let me be honest about somehing: I love yoga, I live for yoga, and yoga has changed my life forever-but it is very difficult to find books about yoga that aren't incredibly annoying. I'm sorry to say it, but yoga sometimes makes people talk like jerks. Thank goodness, then, for Claire Dederer, who has written the book we all need: The long-awaited funny, smart, clear-headed, thoughtful, truthful, an inspiring yoga memoir. To simplify my praise: I absolutely loved this book.'-Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love

'This funny, spectacularly well-observed, and moving book does what even yoga can't: it provides solace while making you laugh. I feel three inches taller.'-Henry Alford, author of How to Live

'Claire Dederer is all these women: a doughter attempting to make sense of an irresistibly nutty divorce: a new mother trying to meet the standards of a peculiarly liberal breed of uber-moms: a wife struggling to salvage intimacy in a marriage slammed by exhaustion, mortagae payments, and encroaching in-law as: and a lost soul who stumbles into a yoga studio and finds salvation. Above all, Dederer is a brilliant writer whose prose sparkels and cuts deep. Poser is a book you will want to immediately share with your friends. It's hilarious, unflinching, and bursting with love.'-Maria Semple, author of This one is Mine

'Poser is a bracingly honest investigation of family and freedom, parenting and perfectionism. It is also funny enough to make most writers swoon with envy.'-James Marcus, author of Amazonia

'As a yoga-culture skeptic, I began this book with a certian dread of encountering breathless self-righteous platitudes, but I was immediately charmed and disarmed by Claire Dederer's fiercely intelligent, funny, unsentimental voice. This book contains real, hard-won insights; yoga became, for Dederer, a rebellion against goodness, not a path to it. This story of her revolt against perfectionism is a joy to behold and a true imspiration.'-Kate Christensen, author of The Great Man and The Epicure's Lament

Contents

Prologue: Camel
1 Triangle
2 Eagle
3 Lotus
4 Crow
5 Pigeon
6 Child's pose 1
7 Cobbler's pose
8 Headstand
9 Child's pose 2
10 Scale
11 Lord of the dance
12 Child's pose 3
13 Half moon
14 Pranayama
15 Warrior II
16 Child's pose 4
17 Vinyasa
18 Child'spose 5
19 Foot behind the head pose
20 Crow, again
21 Mountain
22 Seated forward bend
23 Corpse
24 The jump-through
25 Wheel
26 Handstand

I couldn't finish this one. Although the writing was lovely and I did identify with a lot of what the author discusses at the beginning (the grandparents' raw need to be near the baby, yoga as a way to ease perfectionism) I ultimately had the same problem with this memoir as I did with Eat, Pray, Love: it's really hard to listen to someone so privileged complain so much.

As a mom who has just gone back to full-time work and is pumping milk all day long while missing my child, I just couldn't get into reading about someone who works as a writer part-time from home, gets to be with her child most of the day, and takes tons of yoga classes. She whines pretty much non-stop about it. I'm too envious to sympathize with her complaints about her lifestyle--a lifestyle I would pretty much give a kidney to have.

I will go back to plot-driven fiction for a while and maybe revisit this once I get a little more used to being a working mom. ( )

great book on being a poser ( )

This book had a lot of promise, but turned out to be yet another gen-X memoir of a 70s childhood and current angst over being a parent/wife/woman in the present after all the promise and expectation of equality. Dederer and her husband live in Seattle and are raising 2 kids organically, etc. This book helps her sort out her messed-up childhood, but doesn't help the reader do much. The yoga aspect is merely a framework for the story she wants to explore. I do appreciate her honesty both in regards to raising kids (so hard!) and her yoga practice (so fraught with insecurity!) There are a few gems: "The universe is made of stories, not atoms." Muriel Rukeyser "Family exists in the non-events: the meals, the arguments, the reading together, the backyard soccer, the getting ready for school." And from the perspective of Robert Spellman, a meditation guru in Boulder, CO on the 'uselessness of being good': "I'm not sure 'good' is a very helpful word. If you're busy being good, you're probably going to miss this. You're going to miss the real stuff that's going on all around you." ( )

The fact is, this is really just a memoir of a fairly ordinary life with fairly ordinary events organized around the gimmick of yoga poses. It's well-written but not that interesting. And since my children are, thankfully, long past the baby/toddler age, I am happy to leave questions of how long to breastfeed and what to do about preschool behind me, and I don't have any particular desire to read about them. ( )