One part memoir, one part social critique, and one part yoga history, Claire Dederer’s Poser: My Life in Twenty-Three Yoga Poses asks what contemporary motherhood ought to look like for those whose own mothers “took flight” in the 1970s.

As an elementary introduction to various yogic philosophies and to the growth of yoga in the United States, Claire Dederer Poser is superb. The lessons come in readily consumable supplements that allow us, meanwhile, to indulge in the more delectable of the Yoga book’s offerings, such as its hilarious depictions of highly educated, liberal moms in North Seattle, Dederer’s own community.

In these, Dederer is unsparing: “Weaning wasn’t tolerable until at least one year. This was by consensus of who, exactly? Us. We were mothers with books. We looked things up. … At any rate, situating your child in a stroller was fast becoming yet another way of letting the world know that a) you didn’t really love your kid and b) you were an uneducated dumbshit.”

Dederer, whose work has appeared in The New York Times and The Nation, uses the poses themselves to structure this, her first book. Each constitutes a section and each sends her in search of some profounder understanding about herself and her peers. In Crow, for instance, Dederer reflects on a photograph of her mother in that particular pose: “This picture states everything anyone needs to see in my 1970s. My mother, taking flight. My father, not coming along.”

The idea of flying comes from Erica Jong’s 1973 novel Fear of Flying, which articulated for many a new narrative of female liberation. It is Dederer’s calibrated respect for this narrative that makes her own book doubly reactive. Poser depicts Dederer’s own generation as antithetical to her mother’s, as a generation that, in her account, chooses stability over freedom and goodness over self-fulfilment: “We made up our minds, my brother and I and so many of the grown children of the runaway moms, that we would put our families first and ourselves second. We would be good all the time. We would stay married, no matter what, and drink organic milk.”