"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 put her back out while 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.
Poser: My Life in Twenty-three Yoga Poses
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Book Description
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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.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
50 of 56 people found the following review helpful
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.
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
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.
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
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.
66 of 81 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Vine™ Review
(What's this?)
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.... Read more ›
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.... Read more ›
15 of 16 people found the following review helpful
By M&M
VINE™ VOICE
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Vine™ Review
(What's this?)
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).
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).
Most Recent Customer Reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
My Life in 23 Yoga Poses
Claire Dederer tried yoga ten years ago, because she was told it would help her strained back. In this book, Claire tells the readers about the changes and challenges that have... Read more
Published 25 days ago by Sandra Brazier
5.0 out of 5 stars
Great read, loved this book!
As a yoga student, I enjoyed reading about her class experiences and descriptions of the poses. As a Pacific northwest island dweller, I loved the writing about the area. Read more
Published 2 months ago by Nootka Lu
2.0 out of 5 stars
annoyingly self'absorbed
There's some good writing in this memoir and the structure given by the yoga poses holds the book together well. Read more
Published 3 months ago by clarissa
4.0 out of 5 stars
Less about yoga, more about life
Sometimes a book comes to you at just the right time. This is one of those for me. I have been on a yoga journey lately, and this book reminds me that it is a life long journey,... Read more
Published 3 months ago by Casey J. Lebwohl
1.0 out of 5 stars
Unbearable Self-absorption
I tried to read this, but ended up skimming. I've heard it compared to "Eat, Pray, Love". I thought the quality of the writing (good enough) was similar, the self-absorption of... Read more
Published 4 months ago by tolarjev
5.0 out of 5 stars
What a fun book!
This book was great fun to read! Each time I picked it up, it was like having a friendly chat with a new, delightfully alive neighbor. Read more
Published 5 months ago by Linda M Harriman
3.0 out of 5 stars
Okay...
This book may offer some a seed of interest in yoga. For those experienced and immersed in the yoga life philosophy, this book is bland. I also don't think it is well written.
Published 5 months ago by Stacface1
5.0 out of 5 stars
Fantastic Book
Dederer's Poser is funny, insightful and engaging. She manages not only to capture the exhausted craziness of early motherhood (why are we all wearing clogs? Read more
Published 6 months ago by R. Aronson
3.0 out of 5 stars
Hard to get through
I had to bring myself back to this book over and over again. It was hard to stay with this author. I like yoga - a lot - and I have read several yoga/memoirs. Read more
Published 8 months ago by A. D. Boorman
5.0 out of 5 stars
Loved it!
Reading this book was such an enjoyable experience I didn't want it to end. If you have any interest in Yoga or Seattle, you will enjoy it even more. Read more
Published 10 months ago by larry
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