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Have you read this week's books lead, wherein Anna Minard asks local author/yoga memoirist Claire Dederer if she would like some cheese with that whine? You should:

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 fitting that we ran Minard's excellent review the same week that the New York Times Book Review ran Neil Genzlinger's lame-brained assault against memoirs. In her review of Poser, Minard makes every important point that Genzlinger tries to make, only without any of his annoying generalities or screechy writing style. Go give it a read.