Poser: My Life in Twenty-three Yoga Poses [Kindle Edition]

Claire Dederer (Author)

Book Description

The studio was decorated in the style of “Don’t Be Afraid, We’re Not a Cult.” All was white and blond and clean, as though the room had been designed for surgery, or Swedish people. The only spot of color came from the Tibetan prayer flags strung over the doorway into the studio. In flagrant defiance of my longtime policy of never entering a structure adorned with Tibetan prayer flags, I removed my shoes, paid my ten bucks, and walked in . . .

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

Over the next decade, she would tackle triangle, wheel, and the dreaded crow, becoming fast friends with some poses and developing long-standing feuds with others. At the same time, she found herself confronting the forces that shaped her generation. Daughters of women who ran away to find themselves and made a few messes along the way, Dederer and her peers grew up determined to be good, good, good—even if this meant feeling hemmed in by the smugness of their organic-buying, attachment-parenting, anxiously conscientious little world. Yoga seemed to fit right into this virtuous program, but to her surprise, Dederer found that the deeper she went into the poses, the more they tested her most basic ideas of what makes a good mother, daughter, friend, wife—and the more they made her want something a little less tidy, a little more improvisational. Less goodness, more joy.

Poser is unlike any other book about yoga you will read—because it is actually a book about life. Witty and heartfelt, sharp and irreverent, Poser is for anyone who has ever tried to stand on their head while keeping both feet on the ground.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Amazon Best Books of the Month, January 2011: Yoga, even as it furthers its storefront-by-storefront takeover of American leisure hours, remains a punchline, a shorthand summing-up of a certain way of life. One of the charms of Poser, Claire Dederer's memoir of motherhood and marriage structured around her love affair with yoga, is that--as her title hints--she gets the joke, and tells it very well herself. She knows, to the molecule, the subculture she swims within--the "liberal enclave" of late '90s North Seattle, with its self-policed, guilt-laced dictates about the proper ways to parent, work, play, and wed (and divorce)--and she's well aware of every knee-jerk response you might bring to a story about yoga (she had them too). She's sharp and funny, shifting expertly between earthy put-downs and the earnest openness that yoga leads her to. And she's wisest, and most fascinating, when she's plotting the differences between her mother's generation, breaking out from the traditions of young marriage and motherhood in sloppy, self-invented ways, and her own, responding to the chaos of their parents' marriages and their own youth with the anxiously seamless embrace of attachment parenting. Readers will inevitably be reminded of another witty, navel-gazing, West-meets-East memoir, Eat, Pray, Love, but Dederer's more domestic journey is her very much her own. --Tom Nissley

From Bookmarks Magazine

All of the reviewers enjoyed Poser, but they may have been less than effusive with their praise because they spent so much time explaining what the book was not—not a yoga guide, not a self-help book, not as gimmicky as its title would seem to indicate, not a conventional memoir. That said, Poser does contain scant elements of each, with passages on feminism, attachment parenting, and the history of yoga thrown in. But all that negation suggests that Dederer has achieved something like the self-actualization yoga promises, all without taking herself too seriously. In the end, reviewers seemed to say, the voice of this book is truly Dederer’s own, and more than sufficient.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• File Size: 534 KB
• Print Length: 347 pages
• Page Numbers Source ISBN: 1408822040
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; Reprint edition (December 21, 2010)
• Sold by: Macmillan
• Language: English
• ASIN: B0044782C8
• Text-to-Speech: Enabled
• X-Ray: Not Enabled
• Lending: Not Enabled
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #109,281 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

49 of 55 people found the following review helpful

2.0 out of 5 stars Seldom has so little been written about so well March 3, 2011

By Amazonaholic

Format:Hardcover

This book hooked me quickly, only to disappoint me more and more as it plodded forward. Dederer is an extremely skilled writer, but needs to find something more interesting and consequential to write about than her own obsessive need to keep up with the Joneses. Jeez, the trivial stuff she chooses to make important in her life makes it no mystery why she spends so much of her time unhappy.

The yoga framework works in the early chapters, but is stretched far too thin in later chapters, and becomes an obvious structural gimmick. And while I was waiting for The Big Point to reveal itself, the book ended. Call me crazy, but shouldn't a memoir contain a lesson? If it was in there, I missed it, somewhere between her fretting over whether the way she's raising her kids meets with her friends' approval, and her not actually seeming to enjoy the very children on whom she claims to be focused.

Although her talent is obvious, it's badly misspent on self-absorbed minutiae.

76 of 91 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Not so much about yoga December 16, 2010

By L. Knights VINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Vine™ Review (What's this?)

The back cover says "Poser is unlike any other book about yoga you will read -- because it is actually a book about life." I should have read that innocuous sounding line and taken it a bit more seriously, because although the title contains "yoga" and each chapter is named after a yoga pose and some chapters talk a fair amount about yoga, the book is more about the life of a woman who becomes a mother and spends a LOT of time (at least in the beginning) obsessing about being a mother and talking about her baby. Snore. Meanwhile, some of the chapters in the middle of the book seem to be really reaching to try and relate to yoga in some way.

The other reason this book interested me (besides the yoga) was the part that promised it was about the women of my generation who's mothers ran away to find themselves. As my mother did. However, the author's mother never actually WENT anywhere, the only one who ever seemed to really do any running away was the author herself.

The writing is good and the author is engaging in those moments when I can relate to her, but she fails to be universally engaging. Don't read this book if you aren't a mother - and preferably not just a mother but the sort of mother who thinks about things like co-sleeping and peer-attachment and getting your child into genius-kindergarten.

I kind of get how she was trying to relate her yoga practice to her life but...eh, just not that interesting.

41 of 48 people found the following review helpful

1.0 out of 5 stars Downward Facing Memoir March 24, 2011

By Kathleen A. Hassan

Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase

Sorry but I couldn't even finish it. I love yoga. I love to read. I love a good memoir. This missed the mark completely. I seiously wish I could get a refund. I'll give her this much - she had a knack for describing the poses.

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