The Miserable Contortionist

Much of what you need to know about local author Claire Dederer’s new yoga memoir is right up front. The title, Poser, is clearly meant to be taken both ways: Yoga requires posing, and she’s faking her way through life. The prologue is two pages packed with female-memoir clichés: food equals love, wrenching guilt accompanies doing anything fun for yourself, and those dang repressed emotions. She reports a “scary, tight feeling” in her chest to her yoga teacher, and the teacher replies, “Oh, that’s fear. Try the pose again.” Dederer thinks, “Fear. I hadn’t even known it was there.” There are also glimpses of frankness and humor, but she ultimately loses the battle for self-awareness.

It’s admirable that Dederer offers up so much of herself so honestly. She doesn’t shy away from the fact that she finds motherhood a chore and the North Seattle parenting style that surrounds her—organic everything, co-op preschool, endless nursing—silly. But even as she mocks it (privately, to her husband), she doesn’t see any other option than this kind of parenting-as-performance, making her whole life a play for peer approval.

It doesn’t seem like she realizes how much anger she’s held on to. Even years later, she sounds bitter that this style of parenting was so hard for her. A childless friend mentions traveling, and Dederer thinks, “I no longer had interests. I had a baby.” She finds her daughter “pleasant to spend time with, and certainly ornamental.” One of her parenting rituals? “I actually paid myself money to play stuffed animals with my child. For twenty minutes, which was all I could endure.” On her second pregnancy: “Slumped on the couch, I used to murmur to my belly: ‘Mommies are protagonists, too.'”

The yoga-as-metaphor parts don’t always work. The reason she can’t complete one pose is that the “flight” of pushing up off the mat brings up childhood fears of maternal abandonment. Doing a handstand isn’t hard because it’s reasonably difficult to hold your entire body weight on your arms, it’s more than that—upside-down poses are “upsetting. They ask us to remove our familiar perspective. The world doesn’t make the same sense it did in the moments before you kicked up.” Standing upside down changes your perspective both literally and figuratively, get it?

It’s more than 200 pages before the information that has been searingly obvious to the reader finally floats to the surface for Dederer. A paragraph that she presents as an epiphany would work just as well as jacket copy, since it describes precisely the story we’ve been reading: “I was powerfully unhappy. I was married to a depressive. I was harboring an underground, blossoming hatred of my parents… I felt competitive with my friends and watched them carefully for clues about what I might be doing wrong.” Her larger personal revelation (it comes even later) is wrapped like a spiritual gift but lands with an unceremonious thud: “What if the opposite of good wasn’t bad? What if the opposite of good was real?” A possible corollary: What if you just lived a life you actually wanted instead of the one you saw in the Restoration Hardware catalog? Are we supposed to be amazed?

When she moves away from internal monologue, she’s a good storyteller. She imbues a long list of two-digit numbers with emotional significance (they’re the readouts of the machine her infant daughter is hooked up to in the hospital). As a teenager, she says something awful to her mother, and “the words came out, irretrievable and hurtling, like young soldiers rushing to certain glorious death.” The story of her childhood, played out in a series of flashbacks, is worth its own book. But the central thread of this story is what yoga has taught her, and the lessons feel shallow. Loosen up. Don’t worry so much about appearances. Try to live authentically. Perfectionism hurts. It would’ve been nice to learn something more interesting after all the contortions.