![]() ![]() ![]() “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 - something to hold on to - but instead arrived at ever deepening mystery. 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. Yoga, for Dederer, started out as an attempt to fix something that was wrong: not just searing back pain, but her tremor, her anxiety, her anhedonia, her judgemental nature, her marriage. So when Dederer became a wife and mother herself, it comes as no surprise that she wanted to be nothing less than a steady and steadying embodiment of maternal virtue - scars be damned - all the while judging herself with her own, critical, self-lacerating eye. Her mother lived with a tugboat-captain boyfriend, but stayed married to Dederer’s father in an arrangement that baffled their children and allowed for no closure. Dederer was 6, and she and her brother spent the remainder of their childhoods shuttling between their parents, a blur of ferry rides across Puget Sound, a series of eccentric living situations ranging from chicken coops to boats (she beautifully describes her father living on a houseboat with a water bed as “doubly at sea”). The origins of Dederer’s scars can be traced to 1973, when her parents separated but did not divorce. When my friend asked the analyst about his tic, the analyst responded, “Life leaves its scars on all of us.” Dederer’s tremor calls to mind a story I once heard from a friend who went to see a psychoanalyst who suffered from a facial tic. “What I felt had nothing to do with how I acted.” This, after all, was a woman who had decided to hold her wedding outdoors - on a frigid late October weekend - because she believed that the significant and persistent tremor in her hand would be less noticeable to wedding guests as she held her bouquet. “I was resolute and cheerful I was scared all the time,” she tells us. My idea of motherhood grew from this bargain.”)īut Dederer was willing to go to great lengths to keep up appearances. “The bargain was this: I will do everything perfectly and avert disaster. 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. Her marriage had become unrecognizable, like a facsimile of itself: “Our anxieties were driving us to become other people - he was Earner, I was Mother, like characters in some phenomenally boring Ionesco play,” she writes. ![]() On the surface, she was a paragon of marital and familial contentment, but deeper down, she was lonely and panicked. 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 (she would be the first to tell you) white, middle-class, we-should-all-have-such-problems pain. 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.īut chasing virtue was making Dederer miserable. O’Rourke put it this way: “Family love is messy, clinging, and of an annoying and repetitive pattern, like bad wallpaper.”ĭederer - 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. Bills, laundry, cooking, breast-feeding, baby sitters, holidays, aging parents - P. 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. 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. We started with our babies and tried to decipher all the new rules we had to follow. Early in “Poser,” Claire Dederer describes a regular walk she takes with a new-mom friend in her North Seattle neighborhood: “We made a circle around Green Lake, and so our talk traveled. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |