Customer Reviews

Poser: My Life in Twenty-three Yoga Poses

5 star:		(27)
4 star:		(19)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(8)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

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.

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.

I tried hard to like this book and finish it, given its theme and topic, but the author doesn't try to make herself very likeable. I suppose she gets credit for her honesty, but in the end she's not a sympathetic enough person to make me want to spend any more time with her.

Perhaps her yoga practice helps her achieve some sort of major transformation by the end of the book, but I couldn't get there.

When I heard that someone had written an autobiographical book about life through a yogic lens, I was curious to say the least. I immediately ordered the book and was excited to thumb through it. Being a yoga teacher and someone who's life has been changed and shaped by my practice I hoped to sympathize with the author. But I could not. I felt as if the "yoga" in the book was thrown in merely as a way to attract readers to buy this self-indulgent bore of a read. This book is truly not about the effects of yoga on the body and spirit, its life changing (or enhancing) properties, or any other revelatory aspect of the practice. Sure, there were some mildly funny observations about yoga culture, but that's where her contribution ends. I found the author critical (not constructively), boring, and self-centered. The unsatisfying ending, in no way, made up for the days of my life wasted on this woman's "journey." If you want a glimpse into a spoiled, middle class woman's daily life and neurosis this book is for you. If you want to understand how a life can be affected by a yoga practice (especially in a humorous, engaging way) it is not.

As someone who practices yoga, "Poser: My Life in Twenty-Three Yoga Poses" immediately caught my attention. This sounded very interesting as I know from personal experience how intertwined a yoga practice can be with personal growth. However, not all of the book was exactly what I was expecting.
This memoir is a journey of self discovery - that I expected -- although at times I thought that the author was stretching it a bit (no pun intended) to connect events in her life to a particular yoga pose. What I didn't anticipate was that the issues would be so specific.
For example, she's dealing with questions such as how long she should breast feed her children, whether or not to participate in a co-op pre-school, and how long her children should sleep in the bed with her and her husband. I'm not exactly from same generation so from time to time I had difficulty relating to her. Some issues, such as how to fit her writing career in with her parenting responsibilities and understanding her relationship to her parents was a bit easier for me to connect with.
On the plus side, this is a thoughtful and well-written book. I enjoyed the descriptions of her struggles to master some of the more difficult yoga poses. I also enjoyed the references to various places in the Seattle area (but that's probably because I live there).

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.

I had such high hopes for this book but I became disappointed after just the first twenty pages. So I decided to read the Amazon reviews, many of which confirmed my suspicions that finishing the book wouldn't be worth it. Yet I perused the rest of the book and found it to be drab and flat, the opposite of a robust yoga practice.

I'm a guy who's really into yoga, but I notice that in the U.S. yoga is radically feminized and presented as if it's primarily the domain of women. There is a surplus of books, such as this one, which offer this impression. (A recent issue of "Yoga Journal" magazine had a male yoga teacher on the cover, the first man to grace the cover in seven years!) This has the unfortunate result of driving off scores of men who, to their detriment, think yoga is "girly" and something that "real men" just don't do. Many people don't even realize that yoga was INVENTED BY MEN thousands of years ago and, initially, was an exclusively masculine endeavor -- women were actually prohibited from practicing it. It's great that women have become so passionate about it. Now if only a lot more men would step up to the mat the world would be a better place.

For guys curious about yoga, I enthusiastically recommend "STRETCH: THE UNLIKELY MAKING OF A YOGA DUDE" by Neal Pollack. It's "the hilarious true account of an overweight, balding, skeptical guy's unexpected transformation into a healthy, blissful yoga fiend" -- a great read!

Poser: My Life in Twenty-Three Yoga Poses by Claire Dederer is a memoir about a young mother told through a variety of yoga asanas. Each chapter is titled after a yoga pose-some repeated-that tie in, more or less, with the theme of the chapter itself.

Have you ever read a book that you really, really wanted to like and you ended up only liking it, sorta? That's how I feel about this book. The idea of it, I loved but the interesting premise of giving each chapter a yoga pose often seemed more pretense, done for effect and not always effective. The young mother anxious over every detail of her young daughter's life isn't fully contextualized until later in the book and by then all this navel gazing made this reader want to point out the obvious: children have survived worse parenting than this self-conscious young woman could ever fear to be.

Dederer's humor is off-key for me. I could see the humor on the page but it never even drew a smile to my face, let alone had me chuckling along. If anything, I occasionally found myself laughing at her rather than with her, a feeling that I did not like at all. And what vague moments of enlightenment she achieved over the years, as a wife, parent, yogini-all of these are given short shrift as if she felt they were too delicate to hold up to the harsh light of letting other readers see what she believes and has experienced.

If western yoga is vilified as being watered down, more about exercise than enlightenment, morally irrelevant and mostly a social fad that has come and gone before and will go away soon, then this memoir is a testimony to the truth of these accusations. Dederer's yoga experience is American, with all the best and worst that this implies.

Perhaps one could argue that Dederer knows her American audience and has written a great memoir as a result. And there is enough here to like to not condemn it completely. Her insights into her parent's relationship and her own are of interest and, if they too fall far from the promise of being insightful, at least they allow a reader to realize that the author is not completely narcissistic. Those who loved Gilbert's memoir Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia or are obsessing over everything in their young child's life may feel an empathy for Dederer I do not. Perhaps someone with a better sense of humor would laughed along with her as well. As for me, I really, really wanted to like this book but . . .

Too much time spent on whining about their own lifestyle choices. BE GLAD you are where you are, some people do not have the luxury you have to contemplate their unfulfilled lives. Not the person you would want to waste time with in reality. Grow up and get responsible.

I did not enjoy this book. Perhaps I might have enjoyed it more if I did yoga, grew up in the 1970s, had hippie parents, was a parent myself, or liked narcissism. It honestly reads to me as though the author went to counseling, was told to write about her past and present in a sort of therapeutic journal, and then took said journal, interwove it with some stuff about yoga, and called it a book.

I can see that the author is making an attempt to use yoga as a metaphor for her life. At least, that's what I think she is doing. But it doesn't work. Or maybe that's not at all what she's trying to do; she just thinks yoga is fascinating to discuss for pages on end, and I'm bored out of my mind by it. So yes. If you are into yoga, you might enjoy this book a lot more than I did.