Love and Trouble: A Midlife Reckoning

From the New York Times best-selling author of Poser: My Life in Twenty-Three Yoga Poses, a ferocious, sexy, hilarious memoir about going off the rails at midlife and trying to reconcile the girl she was with the woman she has become.

Claire Dederer is a happily married mother of two, ages nine and 12, when she suddenly finds herself totally despondent and, simultaneously, suffering through a kind of erotic reawakening. This exuberant memoir shifts between her present experience as a middle-aged mom in the grip of mysterious new hungers and herself as a teenager - when she last experienced life with such heightened sensitivity and longing.

From her hilarious chapter titles ("How to Have Sex with Your Husband of Seventeen Years") to her subjects - from the boyfriend she dumped at 14 the moment she learned how to give herself an orgasm, to the girls who ruled her elite private school ("when I left Oberlin I thought I had done with them forever, but it turned out...they also edited all the newspapers and magazines, and wrote all the books"), to raising a teenage daughter herself - Dederer writes with an electrifying blend of wry wit and raw honesty. She exposes herself utterly, and in doing so captures something universal about the experience of being a woman, a daughter, a wife.