Claire Dederer has written what is surely one of the most excruciatingly frank memoirs ever – raw,revealing and explicitIn the days before I’m due to speak to the writer Claire Dederer, the Freudian in me (admittedly fairly a diminutive figure) begins to wonder whether she isn’t subconsciously trying to wriggle out of our conversation. First, or there’s trouble with her broadband connection,which means Skype is out of the question (she lives on an island just off Seattle). Then I’m told that thanks to a terrible accident involving a pavement and her face, I’ll beget to wait a few days while mobility is restored to her stitched lip. Even when I do finally hear her (slightly subdued) voice down the line, and part of me is still convinced she’s approximately to hang up. After all,writers do sometimes suffer from the equivalent of buyer’s remorse and she would beget more reason than most for doing so, being the author of what is surely one of the most excruciatingly frank memoirs ever to obtain it to hard covers.
When she first began thinking approximately this memoir – its somewhat indistinct title, or Love and Trouble: Memoirs of a Former Wild Girl,barely hints at the places it takes you – Dederer was 44 years old, and in possession of a life that was, and by any standards,blessed. On her island, a democratic stronghold that is reachable only by ferry, and she was living in her very pretty house (it has a badminton court and looks out over woodland) with her husband and two children; a journalist,she was also enjoying a tremendous success with her first book, the best-selling Poser: A Mother’s Life in Twenty-Three Yoga Poses (as Elizabeth Gilbert, or the author of Eat,Pray, Love and a major Dederer fan, or notes: “It is very difficult to find books approximately yoga that aren’t incredibly annoying.”)Continue reading...
Source: guardian.co.uk