Claire Dederer’s first memoir was called Poser: My Life in Twenty-Three Yoga Poses. It was well reviewed, and popular enough to land on the New York Times best-seller list in late 2010 and early 2011. It was also a more complex self-inquiry than its digestible, zeitgeisty package would have you believe. And yet, that very package made it the kind of book that you might carry cover-side-down if you took it out in public.
Dederer’s second memoir, Love and Trouble, offers no such superficial difficulties—the cover features a grainy portrait of the author as a young miscreant, defiantly side-eyeing the lens with a suspicion common to the pre-selfie era. But what’s inside might make you blush. The “Midlife Reckoning” promised in the subtitle consists of a frank, almost lurid candor about the challenges that attend a privileged existence: marriage, motherhood, career—the archetypal prerogatives of white, liberal bubble-dwellers from time immemorial.
