(Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 352 pages, $26)
Yoga has just found the champion it needs, said Bill Eichenberger in the Cleveland Plain Dealer. Whatever the benefits of the ancient Indian practice, its aspirations and pretzel-like poses can be “funny in the right hands,” and memoirist Claire Dederer is a writer who knows how to “set up a punch line.” As a married mother of two raising her children in gentrified North Seattle, Dederer skeptically turned to yoga a decade ago at the suggestion of her liberal-mom peers after she threw her back out while breast-feeding. Gradually, her wariness transforms into acceptance, and yoga becomes in this warmly funny book “the act that repeatedly forces her to look inward.” Its opening pages find her in class complaining out loud about a “tight feeling” she gets while attempting a camel pose. “Oh, that’s fear,” says the instructor. “Try the pose again.”
Dederer’s memoir “is going to be big,” said Buzzy Jackson in The Boston Globe. Yoga is the pretext, but Dederer makes it a lens for exploring the experiences of legions of “hip, progressive, trying-really-hard-to-do-it-right” mothers. She hilariously “skewers the pretensions of her fellow moms,” all of them committed to attachment parenting, progressive schooling, and buying organic. Yet with pitch-perfect self-deprecation, she also never lets you forget that she herself is part of the joke. Her narrative achieves “a yoga-like balance between pain and humor.” Candid descriptions of her anxieties about becoming an overbearing mom or a less-than-perfect wife can come rushing in as she sits in yoga class with one foot tucked ridiculously behind her head.
Subscribe to The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
The author deserves a lot of credit for venturing into territory where most “serious female writers fear to tread,” said Dani Shapiro in The New York Times. Topics like bills, breast-feeding, laundry, baby-sitters, and, yes, yoga tend to get an essayist dismissed as a lightweight. But Dederer, a seasoned freelance writer, has managed to present them in such a way that they can’t be “dismissed as trivial.” At times, her journalist’s need to provide evidence takes over, resulting in short treatises on feminism or the history of yoga that “seem hijacked from a scholarly essay.” But such passages, though out of place, are incapable of ruining this “powerful, honest, ruefully funny memoir.” Poser is a “lovely book”—every bit as cathartic as a 90-minute yoga class and far more fun to boot.
-
Critics' choice: Outstanding new Japanese restaurantsFeature An all-women sushi team, a 15-seat listening bar, and more
-
Why do Dana White and Donald Trump keep pushing for a White House UFC match?TODAY'S BIG QUESTION The president and the sports mogul each have their own reasons for wanting a White House spectacle
-
'Quiet vacationing': a secret revolt against workplace cultureThe explainer You can be in two places at once
-
Also of interest...in picture books for grown-upsfeature How About Never—Is Never Good for You?; The Undertaking of Lily Chen; Meanwhile, in San Francisco; The Portlandia Activity Book
-
Author of the week: Karen Russell
feature Karen Russell could use a rest.
-
The Double Life of Paul de Man by Evelyn Barish
feature Evelyn Barish “has an amazing tale to tell” about the Belgian-born intellectual who enthralled a generation of students and academic colleagues.
-
Book of the week: Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt by Michael Lewis
feature Michael Lewis's description of how high-frequency traders use lightning-fast computers to their advantage is “guaranteed to make blood boil.”
-
Also of interest...in creative rebellion
feature A Man Called Destruction; Rebel Music; American Fun; The Scarlet Sisters
-
Author of the week: Susanna Kaysen
feature For a famous memoirist, Susanna Kaysen is highly ambivalent about sharing details about her life.
-
You Must Remember This: Life and Style in Hollywood’s Golden Age by Robert Wagner
feature Robert Wagner “seems to have known anybody who was anybody in Hollywood.”
-
Book of the week: Astoria: John Jacob Astor and Thomas Jefferson’s Lost Pacific Empire by Peter Stark
feature The tale of Astoria’s rise and fall turns out to be “as exciting as anything in American history.”