When Dederer stops working by her own lights, however, and instead seeks the insight of a guru, the book falters. "Left leg hooked over right knee left foot hooked behind right calf. We would stay married, no matter what, and drink organic milk."īut Poser also rebels against the extremes of this reaction and, in doing so, joins a shelf-full of recent books that attack the wholesome devotions of attachment parenting and its baby-wearing, co-sleeping fundamentalisms. 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. It is Dederer's calibrated respect for this narrative that makes her own book doubly reactive. The idea of flying comes from Erica Jong's 1973 novelįear of Flying, which articulated for many a new narrative of female liberation. In Crow, for instance, Dederer meditates on a photograph of her mother in that particular pose: "This picture says everything anyone needs to know about my 1970s. Each constitutes a chapter and each sends her in search of some deeper understanding about herself and her generation. Dederer, whose work has appeared in The New York Times and The Nation, uses the poses themselves to structure this, her first book.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |