Claire Dederer's Poser: My Life in Twenty-Three Yoga Poses

Read: August 27, 2011

I wish I could remember where I came across this book and which publication recommended it, because it's not the kind of book I usually pick up. I think the closest comparison I can make is to Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love, though thankfully it's not nearly as solipsistic.
This memoir looks at a new mother's life in Seattle, struggling against all of the hippie advice/admonitions to new mothers: make your own baby food from organic fruits and vegetables, breast feed for several years, carry your baby with you everywhere you go in one of those slings, and my favorite/most absurd - co-sleeping (babies and toddlers share their parents' bed). Claire tells her story of struggle against this and the concomitant guilt and worries through a series of vignettes and flashbacks to her childhood. When she was young, Claire's mother met and started dating a much younger, very stereotypical Seattle hippie man (whose name I've forgotten). Her parents do not divorce, in part because they worry about how that would affect the childrens' lives, so they maintain this careful balance where the husband and wife remain legally married and share property, etc, but live apart, while the mother lives with her new boyfriend.
Claire's theory about her own life follows something like this: mothers in the 60s and 70s embraced their freedom and relief of duties which flowed from the sexual revolution, and this led to a lot of unstructured, broken homes. Parenting was stress-free because people were the masters of their own destinies, and hovering parents would only create children who needed to make the same fight against "the man," or however you phrase that particular struggle. Then, when those kids grew up, they prioritized all the things they didn't have when they were younger: solid homes, mothers who were invested in their kids happiness, private schools and play groups that ensured the children's success and uniqueness. Ergo, all the crazy parenting rules. It's one of those sociological explanations that can barely be proven, and if it did provide evidence it would necessarily be anecdotal. So, it bothered me somewhat that Dederer presented it as a universally applicable explanation rather than focusing on how it impacted her own life, because in that it was an interesting archnarrative.
Dederer uses a yoga theme to link together the vignettes. She develops serious back pain late in her pregnancy and it ultimately makes breastfeeding impossible. Several of her friends recommend yoga and a lot of the humor in the book comes from Dederer's many attempts to figure it out. She starts by venturing into a new age bookstore with her large stroller and buying a mat and a video. I think trying to learn yoga from a video is almost impossible, as Claire discovered, but it was funny to read about her attempts. Throughout the book, the chapters are each assigned a pose, usually one that Claire learns/struggles with in the chapter, but also one that thematically relates to the chapter subject.
My question when I read memoirs is always, "why does this matter?" There are oodles and oodles of memoirs out on bookshelves right now and they must meet at least one of two criteria to be worthwhile: excellent writing or fascinating subject. Ideally, both. Dederer's book was mildly interesting because I enjoy reading about yoga (I find it somewhat inspirational to go and practice on my own) and it was also mildly interesting to read about these crazy mothering rules in Seattle because it was so foreign. The writing was engaging and humorous. Her characters were fully realized and lovable, which one would hope to be the case because she's writing about her friends and family members. Despite this casual enjoyment, however, I don't think I would recommend it to anybody who didn't express a lot of interest in some of the subjects Dederer talks about. It's one of the many memoirs out there that will be enjoyed by people who are already familiar with the subject matter, but won't reach out to new audiences successfully.