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    Poser: My Life in Twenty-three Yoga Poses
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    Poser: My Life in Twenty-three Yoga Poses
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    Poser: My Life in Twenty-three Yoga Poses
    Ebook396 pages6 hours

    Poser: My Life in Twenty-three Yoga Poses

    By Claire Dederer

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    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.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateDec 21, 2010
    ISBN9781429973182
    Unavailable
    Poser: My Life in Twenty-three Yoga Poses
    Author

    Claire Dederer

    Claire Dederer is an essayist, critic and reporter. Her writing has appeared in Vogue, the New York Times, Slate, Yoga Journal, Real Simple and the Nation. She lives on an island near Seattle with her husband and their two children.

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    Reviews for Poser

    3.5/5

    131 ratings19 reviews

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    • 3/5
      I enjoyed this memoir. The author describes how her life had taken over and then she began studying yoga. She thought yoga was a way to improve herself, but eventually finds that yoga helped her love who she already is.
    • 3/5
      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.
    • 2/5
      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."
    • 3/5
      I started this book beacuse it is another book about yoga (to limber me up for actually doing yoga) but I tore through it becuase I loved Claire's voice and her ideas about being good and being good at something.
    • 4/5
      Loved this book. It was a book club pick for the Women's Adventure Book Club on Facebook. It's a memoir, and this woman can write! As it mainly takes place in the Seattle area, and then in Boulder, CO, I felt like I learned a lot about the culture of those two worlds. This is a book about being a daughter, a wife, a mother, a writer, a yoga student, and, most of all, a woman trying to be perfect in an imperfect world. It is a truly inspiring book.
    • 3/5
      I always enjoy memoirs, and I'm kind of on a yoga kick, so I picked this one up. I have very mixed feelings about it. First, I think the structure is contrived. The poses described don't follow logically, and it feels artificial. However, it was good to see her growth.Dederer's childhood left her with a host of issues, and through the book, she slowly works through a lot of them. However, she overgeneralizes her experience. Because her mother was flakey, all mothers of that era were flakey. Because she didn't like attachment parentlng, no one should do it. Because she is a follower and does what other people expect, everyone blindly does what they are supposed to.Once I realized this, and was able to read it as her very oblique way of talking about herself, it was an interesting read. She did grow a lot through yoga, as well as through actually moving away from her odd family.
    • 3/5
      making the ho-hum of a very ordinary life interesting.
    • 3/5
      First and foremost, Dederer is a phenomenal writer. Her prose is wry, incisive, hilarious and a joy to read. She also name-checks the Betsy-Tacy books. So I adore her, totally.

      The book, not so much. The book is a sprawling sort of memoir that tries to be too many things. The structure imposed by the chapters named for yoga poses just doesn't work. The material is strong enough that it could have stood alone without the awkward wrangling into shape- this would have been so much stronger, I think, as a linear memoir.

      I'm not saying I didn't enjoy it- I did, very much. I just found the structure to be pretty awkward. 3.5
    • 4/5
      I live in the Seattle area and had my kid about the same time as Dederer, so I can so totally relate. Very funny, very well-written essays about living in Seattle and becoming a parent.
    • 4/5
      I almost stopped reading this book about 50 pages in. I was enjoying Dederer's writing, with all of its pithy GenX-ness, but I found her perspective very critical. She seemed to have concluded, since she felt pressured by her peer group to practice attachment parenting and it didn't work for her, that anyone who practiced attachment parenting was doing it because of social pressure. Attachment parenting devotees were some kind of Stepford Wives, blindly following the dictates of the masses. She ignored the idea that maybe attachment parenting works for some people and it didn't work for her. And she described What to Expect When You're Expecting as a left-wing book. I don't know many of my peers who would describe any book that doesn't list non-reclining positions for pushing as a left-wing book. We all hated that book. We gravitated towards Ina May Gaskin and Sheila Kitzinger. Had we been less ecologically and free-speech inclined, we would have burned What to Expect When You're Expecting.

      Basically, I took her judgements personally, which is kind of ridiculous. I mean, she doesn't know me. We gave birth to our first children five years and nearly 1000 miles from one another. We're part of the same generation, but just barely.

      But I soldiered on, and I'm glad I did because this book is all about personal growth. I felt a kinship to Dederer as she moved from being guarded and judgmental to being more open and accepting of other ways of raising children. Although I was on the other side of the fence (e.g., my first child refused a binky so I became militantly opposed to them by my second child), I recognized her journey from traumatic birth experience through anxious early motherhood through gradual comfort with her chosen path separate from what her peers were doing.

      Although Dederer places a lot of value on staying in one's hometown, this is a particular downside to staying put, at least from my perspective. I have never had a hometown. I moved every three years as a child. As a grown-up, the longest I've lived in any one place is six years. Until I joined Facebook, I didn't even know what my elementary school friends thought of different parenting practices, much less what they thought of me for being a weirdo mommy. It is, in some ways, liberating to be a nomad, to lose touch with my past.

      But by the end of the book I found myself jealous of Dederer. She finds the secret for her, which is to move away for a couple of years and then come "home". I like this idea, but without a "home," this is simply not an option for me. My whole life has been "away." Even if I moved to where my dad is or where my mom is, I wouldn't have a network of lifelong friends to tap into because the friends of my childhood are scattered across the country. I'm equally at home everywhere, and I'm equally a stranger everywhere. Dederer's voluntary exodus from and then voluntary return to her home just highlighted for me how much I don't have a home. It kind of pissed me off. I wanted a place to go home to, goshdarnit!

      Even as it pissed me off, though, I delighted in watching Dederer's journey. I could relate to the growth-through-yoga that she experienced. Many of her fears and realizations seemed very familiar to me. I especially appreciated her chapter about handstand. I first attempted handstand in yoga teacher training. There an Iyengar teacher described me as "beyond clumsy" in handstand. It was a caution to another student about me in front of me: "Be careful," he said, "she's beyond clumsy." Meaning, "Watch it because she's likely to fall on you while you're trying to assist her." I know it's silly, but this teacher's words have echoed in my mind at practically every yoga practice I've done since. I've gradually allowed it to become background noise rather than letting it take center stage, but I sure as heck haven't tried handstand since then. (Well, once during a workshop, but I embarrassingly dissolved into tears, and I haven't tried since then.)

      Some reviewers have complained that the links between Dederer's personal reflections and the poses for each chapter are rather tenuous. I agree to a point. Some chapters did seem to be "yoga pose" "everything else". But those were the minority. For the most part, I found the link between yoga and her own personal growth to be pretty close.

      The part I loved best was watching Dederer accept her reality in a less judgmental way. Rather than comparing herself to everyone else and/or throwing out what she'd built and trying to start over again as her mother had, Dederer took what she had and made it something that worked better for her. I find this inspirational. Even if it does involve having a hometown and a greater skill at making friends than I have.
    • 3/5
      Very nice memoir only organizationally about yoga poses. I was especially interested in this young woman's experience as a child of hippie-generation parents finding her own way to raise a child, have a relationship, do yoga.
    • 3/5
      (Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)As part of my regular reading schedule throughout a year, I like to throw in some completely random choices sometimes just to shake things up, sometimes titles that have barely any connection to my own life and that I would normally otherwise never pick up; this book was the latest such random pick, and like a lot of others of this type, I found it okay for what it was, while acknowledging that those it's more designed for will probably like it a lot more than that. A former indie-rocker who still pals around with the founders of Sub Pop, Dederer's late pregnancy and other issues were adding a significant amount of stress to her life in the creative-class bohemian-bourgeoise neighborhoods of North Seattle where she lives; the rest of this book is a look at Dederer's attempts to add yoga to her cynical, black-jeans-wearing life, offering up plenty of comments along the way about her growing sense of "Enlightenment Lite" concerning the transition into motherhood and middle-age. But alas, this is too badly paced to appeal to a big general audience -- for example, the parts that describe the actual yoga positions go on way too long, and the book is filled with the kinds of pointless digressions (a ten-page description of an entire dinner party from start to finish, for example) that feel like they were added specifically to bump up this glorified magazine article into the size of a full-length book -- plus I have to admit, given that one of the main points is for Dederer to dish on her New-Agey-but-secretly-draconian eco-liberal neighbors, there came a point quickly where I started asking over and over why she didn't just, you know, move the f-ck out of North Seattle instead of writing a 300-page story about how much she hates it there. (And of course we all know the answer -- because she proves in this manuscript to be just as hypocritically guilty of this liberal-fascist behavior as all the people she's complaining about, yet another aspect of these types of "It's Everyone Else's Fault But Mine" memoirs that drives me in particular a little crazy.) But still, like I said, I suspect this will appeal more to those who find themselves in similar situations, which is why it's getting a high middle-of-the-road score today instead of the low middle-of-the-road score I usually give such books. It comes recommended in that specific spirit.Out of 10: 7.9
    • 3/5
      I read this right after "Falling for Me," by Anna David, another gimmicky memoir. It's a good, but somewhat tiresome, device - hooking your story to something else: in David's case, the book "Sex and the Single Girl," and in Dederer's, yoga poses.I've been practicing yoga for over 10 years, so I found the yoga parts much more interesting than Dederer's self-absorbed not all that reflective life. Without the links to yoga, I fear this might have been quite a dull book.
    • 4/5
      i didn't really like the yoga connection but i liked this more as it went on. it was quite funny. i enjoyed her descriptions of her yoga teachers. i'm a teacher of adults and it's always interesting to see how other people deal with adult students.
    • 3/5
      An interesting idea -- at least to a yoga enthusiast -- and the writing about yoga is also interesting. It was hard for me, however, to be get involved with the heroine, or to be very sympathetic with her problems. That may be my problem as much as the novel's, since I am an old yoga enthusiast with an old marriage, but other seniors might take note.
    • 3/5
      I read this book after reading 2 reviews of it, one of which was within the yoga community. I found the narrator easy to relate to, though it felt that the first 2/3 of the book were much better written and more developed than the ending. The story line changes from present to past, and I found the stories there interesting, but could not see the direct connection to the author's yoga practice. However, it is worth noting that the author candidly explores several academic texts on yoga but does not study with a "famous" guru. Her "yoga mom" sensibilities were much appreciated by me, who does not have an opportunity to travel aboard or live in an ashram.
    • 2/5
      Suffers from what most memoirs of this ilk suffer from: a tenuous connection to the "theme" and an overwhelming sense of self-absorption of the part of the author.
    • 3/5
      Poser By Claire Dederer A fresh, witty, secret smile to yourself memoir. This author shares her innermost thoughts and feelings from her childhood through the 1970's and her parents divorce to her married adult life raising two children in Seattle. Claire finds yoga comforting, challenging and questionable. She intertwines her obsession/love of yoga with her daily life as a mom, daughter, wife, friend and writer. Yoga is always there for her and always changing. Claire is funny and warm and this is an easy enjoyable read that I highly recommend.
    • 4/5
      My primary interest is in motherhood, and I found the book engaging. I wish, though, that the Claire Dederer had spoken even more about being a mother -- especially after she had two children -- and less about her remembrances of her own childhood. Also, I do not know anything about yoga, and so I probably missed many of the author's points.