This book is going to be big. Claire Dederer manages to pack everything into this personal memoir: childbirth, money, schools, social class, career anxiety, parenting, sex, friendship, marriage, and yes, yoga. And don’t forget Dansko clogs — “always, always, [the] clogs.’’ Thousands of American mothers share Dederer’s experience as they glance up from their darling, maddening new babies to find themselves in a new sphere: hip, progressive, trying-really-hard-to-do-it-right mom-world. “Poser’’ is written for them.
“We were a generation of hollow-eyed women, chasing virtue. We, the mothers of North Seattle, were consumed with trying to do everything right . . . cook organic food, buy expensive wooden toys. . . . Also, don’t forget to recycle.’’ Dederer and her husband are freelance writers trying to make their creative careers mesh with the demands of raising two young children. Despite their creativity they find themselves sinking into traditional roles: “He was Earner, I was Mother, like characters in some phenomenally boring Ionesco play.’’ As a writer, however, Dederer is never boring. “Poser’’ achieves a yoga-like balance between pain and humor. While she may skewer the pretensions of her fellow moms and yoginis, she never lets herself off the hook, either. Her honest descriptions of her own fears and shortcomings as a parent, wife, and daughter are at the center of this book. Dederer first attempts yoga to relieve an aching back (thrown out while breast-feeding) but is soon seduced, despite her skepticism and aversion to Tibetan prayer flags, by the calming effect it has on her mind. “I didn’t think of it as an escape; I just felt the relief of moving and not thinking. There was also this relief: It was a room I didn’t have to clean.’’
