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Life told through yoga
By Dani Shapiro |
January 2, 2011, Sunday
|
Print Edition
Print Edition
EARLY in "Poser," Claire Dederer describes a walk she takes with a new-mom friend in her neighborhood: "We made a circle around Green Lake, and so our talk traveled. We started with our babies and tried to decipher all the new rules we had to follow. The talk opened out to work, maybe briefly touched the real world, and then, like a tight magic circle, closed back in on babies again. It was a dark enchantment."
This dark enchantment with the joys, rigors and travails of building a family life is at the center of this 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. Bills, laundry, cooking, breast-feeding, baby sitters, holidays, aging parents - my favorite curmudgeon, Nietzsche, put it this way: "Family love is messy, clinging, and of an annoying and repetitive pattern, like bad wallpaper."
Dederer - a highly self-aware, clever book critic who has contributed to The New York Times Book Review - not only takes on this bad wallpaper as a subject, but she does so within the framework of her discovery of our New Age national pastime: yoga. Yoga! Let the eye-rolling begin. But 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.
"We were a generation of hollow-eyed women, chasing virtue," she tells us. "We, the mothers of North Seattle, were consumed with trying to do everything right." North Seattle was a place where attachment parenting was all the rage. Kids weren't weaned until they spoke in full sentences. Families all slept in the same bed; ate the same organic, locally produced food; and lived in an enriching environment safe from the dangers of plastic toys and disposable diapers.
But chasing virtue was making Dederer miserable. By the time she strolled into her first yoga class - yoga being the panacea of the demographic of which she was reluctantly and yet somehow also enthusiastically a part - Dederer was in all kinds of white, middle-class, we-should-all-have-such-problems pain. On the surface, she was a paragon of marital and familial contentment, but deeper down, she was lonely and panicked. She was constantly terrified in the wake of her daughter's harrowing birth, which left the baby temporarily in quarantine and hooked up to an oxygen tank. "The bargain was this: I will do everything perfectly and avert disaster. My idea of motherhood grew from this bargain."
Yoga, for Dederer, started out as an attempt to fix something that was wrong: not just searing back pain, but her anxiety, her anhedonia, her judgemental nature, her marriage. She wasn't sure exactly what yoga was. A spiritual practice? Gymnastics for uncoordinated people? A gentle workout for rich women with too much time on their hands? She worried about adopting another culture's cosmology. "Was there something inherently inauthentic about it?" She moved restlessly from one type of class and teacher to another, in search of answers and solid facts but instead arrived at ever deepening mystery. She also found an elegant structure for her memoir, in which she uses various yoga positions not only as a pithy way to tell her story, but as something quite a bit deeper than that.
"Poser" is a powerful, honest, ruefully funny memoir about one woman's open-hearted reckoning with her demons. I only wish that Dederer had trusted herself a bit more. Ever the journalist, she has a well-honed instinct to provide backup, context, proof to support her circumstances, as if hedging against the possibility that this might be read simply as a woman's singular story. In numerous passages that seem hijacked from a scholarly essay, she supplies brief treatises on feminism, or attachment parenting, or the history of yoga. In these spots, it seems her inner "good student" won out. See? She seemed to be saying. This isn't only about me - it's a trend, a syndrome, a generation. Stop, I wanted to tell her. Breathe and stay still. Keep your gaze close. In the hands of a gifted writer, the universal is embedded within the personal. Guess what? Your bad wallpaper made for a lovely book.
This dark enchantment with the joys, rigors and travails of building a family life is at the center of this 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. Bills, laundry, cooking, breast-feeding, baby sitters, holidays, aging parents - my favorite curmudgeon, Nietzsche, put it this way: "Family love is messy, clinging, and of an annoying and repetitive pattern, like bad wallpaper."
Dederer - a highly self-aware, clever book critic who has contributed to The New York Times Book Review - not only takes on this bad wallpaper as a subject, but she does so within the framework of her discovery of our New Age national pastime: yoga. Yoga! Let the eye-rolling begin. But 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.
"We were a generation of hollow-eyed women, chasing virtue," she tells us. "We, the mothers of North Seattle, were consumed with trying to do everything right." North Seattle was a place where attachment parenting was all the rage. Kids weren't weaned until they spoke in full sentences. Families all slept in the same bed; ate the same organic, locally produced food; and lived in an enriching environment safe from the dangers of plastic toys and disposable diapers.
But chasing virtue was making Dederer miserable. By the time she strolled into her first yoga class - yoga being the panacea of the demographic of which she was reluctantly and yet somehow also enthusiastically a part - Dederer was in all kinds of white, middle-class, we-should-all-have-such-problems pain. On the surface, she was a paragon of marital and familial contentment, but deeper down, she was lonely and panicked. She was constantly terrified in the wake of her daughter's harrowing birth, which left the baby temporarily in quarantine and hooked up to an oxygen tank. "The bargain was this: I will do everything perfectly and avert disaster. My idea of motherhood grew from this bargain."
Yoga, for Dederer, started out as an attempt to fix something that was wrong: not just searing back pain, but her anxiety, her anhedonia, her judgemental nature, her marriage. She wasn't sure exactly what yoga was. A spiritual practice? Gymnastics for uncoordinated people? A gentle workout for rich women with too much time on their hands? She worried about adopting another culture's cosmology. "Was there something inherently inauthentic about it?" She moved restlessly from one type of class and teacher to another, in search of answers and solid facts but instead arrived at ever deepening mystery. She also found an elegant structure for her memoir, in which she uses various yoga positions not only as a pithy way to tell her story, but as something quite a bit deeper than that.
"Poser" is a powerful, honest, ruefully funny memoir about one woman's open-hearted reckoning with her demons. I only wish that Dederer had trusted herself a bit more. Ever the journalist, she has a well-honed instinct to provide backup, context, proof to support her circumstances, as if hedging against the possibility that this might be read simply as a woman's singular story. In numerous passages that seem hijacked from a scholarly essay, she supplies brief treatises on feminism, or attachment parenting, or the history of yoga. In these spots, it seems her inner "good student" won out. See? She seemed to be saying. This isn't only about me - it's a trend, a syndrome, a generation. Stop, I wanted to tell her. Breathe and stay still. Keep your gaze close. In the hands of a gifted writer, the universal is embedded within the personal. Guess what? Your bad wallpaper made for a lovely book.
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