Poser

Reviews

“This funny, spectacularly well-observed, and moving book does what even yoga can’t: it provides solace while making you laugh. I feel three inches taller.”

“Why did Claire Dederer take up yoga? Short answer: for the same kinds of reasons that Elizabeth Gilbert changed her life in Eat, Pray, Love and to much the same funny, charming, self-deprecating, stealthily inspirational, and (quite possibly) bestselling effect…This appealing writer’s first book is long overdue. It’s clear from the start that she will be transformed and find a sensible, spiritual, nonsappy way to become a devotee before Poser is over.”

“A fine first memoir, and it’s heartening to see a serious female writer take such a risky step into territory where writers of literary ambition fear to tread, lest they be dismissed as trivial…[What] makes Poser work on a lot of levels is that first in line to ask searching questions and poke fun is the author herself…Poser is a powerful, honest, ruefully funny memoir about one woman’s openhearted reckoning with her demons…In the hands of a gifted writer, the universal is embedded within the personal. Guess what? Your bad wallpaper made for a lovely book.”

“Let me be honest about something: I love yoga, I live for yoga, and yoga has changed my life forever—but it is very difficult to find books about yoga that aren’t incredibly annoying. I’m sorry to say it, but yoga sometimes makes people talk like jerks. Thank goodness, then, for Claire Dederer, who has written the book we all need: the long-awaited funny, smart, clear-headed, thoughtful, truthful, and inspiring yoga memoir. To simplify my praise: I absolutely loved this book.”

“Claire Dederer is all these women: a daughter attempting to make sense of an irresistibly nutty divorce; a new mother trying to meet the ridiculously high standards of a peculiarly liberal breed of uber-moms; a wife struggling to salvage intimacy in a marriage slammed by exhaustion, mortgage payments and encroaching in-laws; and a lost soul who stumbles into a yoga studio and finds salvation. Above all, Dederer is a brilliant writer whose prose sparkles and cuts deep. Poser is a book you will want to immediately share with your friends. It’s hilarious, unflinching and bursting with love.”

“As a yoga-culture skeptic, I began this book with a certain dread of encountering breathless, self-righteous platitudes about the spiritual healing powers of yoga, but I was immediately charmed and disarmed by Dederer’s fiercely intelligent, funny, unsentimental voice. This book contains real, hard-won insights; yoga became, for Dederer, a rebellion against goodness, not a path to it. This story of her revolt against perfectionism is a joy to behold and a true inspiration.”

“Poser achieves something rare: It’s a contemporary book about yoga that doesn’t leave you squirming, suspect, or bored…The illusion of commiseration here is really just a triumph of truth telling, of a writer having the courage to confront her limits and sit, uncritically, in the messy present. Like a yoga pose, it doesn’t have to be perfect to be exquisite.”

“[Poser has] the gravitational pull of a good novel and an unusually genuine voice that envelops the reader swiftly…Dederer sparkles when introspection is ruthless—the result reads true and funny.”

“This memoir about her decade doing downward dog while raising two kids and trying to keep her marriage alive reads like Eat, Pray, Love for hip but harried moms…Funny, well-observed, and ultimately inspiring.”

“In any case, Dederer’s book is only tangentially about yoga. It could just as easily have been called ‘How to Be a Perfect Mom, Wife, and Daughter in the Uber-Liberal Confines of the Pacific Northwest.’…Dederer proves an effective storyteller. She knows how to set up a punch line, how to foreshadow a big moment, how to create drama out of the everyday bits of a life. Yoga is the catalyst, the act that repeatedly forces her to look inward.”

 “Poser, which tells the story of Claire’s attempt to become absolutely perfect at yoga—and, by extension, life—is knocking me out. It’s very funny about yoga culture and disarmingly honest about how complicated marriage and family life can be.”

“Dederer is a mother with the heart of a poet.”

“With lighthearted humor and a touch of irony…Dederer’s memoir, like a challenging yoga class, flows smoothly and shows by example that a full life is one that is constantly in motion.”

“Dederer’s humor is tangy and precision-aimed; her targets are the sine qua non of memoirs: mothers and marriage…Dederer writes superbly and offers sharp insights into family dynamics as well as hatha yoga’s impact on American life, the focus of a growing number of groundbreaking books.”

“[An] awesomely funny and candid ode to life, love, and yoga…Dederer uses the centuries-old practice as the fascinating backdrop to her deeply personal story…which she writes about with clarity and an amazing lack of self-pity.”

“Few writers have characterized yoga with as dead-on honesty, humor, and ultimately, appreciation. She gives a good philosophical history but the brilliance is found in her portrayal of the many classes she attends…It is not a book about yoga, it is about a life, and in being so, may come closer to yoga’s wisdom than the ubiquitous how-tos. Christine Williams reads with a bright, sardonic cheerfulness that well matches the prose.”

“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.”

“Dederer contributes nuggets of yoga trivia paired with a droll, self-effacing delivery that’s both down-to-earth and pleasingly introspective. Delicious fun with a friendly nudge for readers on the fence about yoga.”

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