Poser : A Mother's Life in Twenty-Three Yoga Poses

Ten years ago, Claire Dederer put her back out while breastfeeding her baby daughter. Told to try yoga by everyone from the woman behind the counter at the co-op to the homeless guy on the corner, she signed up for her first class. She fell madly in love. Over the next decade, she tackled Triangle, Wheel and the dreaded Crow, becoming fast friends with some poses and developing long-standing feuds with others. At the same time she found herself confronting the forces that shaped her generation. Daughters of women who ran away to find themselves and made a few messes along the way, Dederer and her peers grew up determined to be good, good, good - even if this meant feeling hemmed in by the smugness of their organic-buying, attachment-parenting, anxiously conscientious little world. Yoga seemed to fit right into this virtuous programme, but to her surprise Dederer found that the deeper she went into the poses the more they test her most basic ideas of what makes a good mother, daughter, friend, wife - and the more they made her want something a little less tidy, a little more improvisational. Less goodness, more joy. Witty and heartfelt, sharp and irreverent, Poser is unlike any other book about yoga you will read - because it is actually a book about life...

Claire Dederer is an essayist, critic and reporter. Her writing has appeared in Vogue, the New York Times, Slate, Yoga Journal, Real Simple and the Nation. She lives on an island near Seattle with her husband and their two children.