Claire Dederer w/ Peggy Orenstein

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.

Join us as we welcome Claire Dederer to celebrate Love and Trouble: A Midlife Reckoning. She’ll be reading and in conversation with Peggy Orenstein!

Claire Dederer is a happily married mother of two, ages nine and twelve, 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 fourteen 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.

Claire Dederer is the author of the New York Times best-selling memoir Poser: My Life in Twenty-Three Yoga Poses, which has been translated into twelve languages, and which Elizabeth Gilbert called “the book we all need.” A book critic, essayist, and reporter, Dederer is a longtime contributor to The New York Timesand has also written for The Atlantic, Vogue, Slate, The Nation, and New York magazine, among other publications. She lives on an island near Seattle with her family.

 Peggy Orenstein is the author of The New York Times best-sellers Girls & Sex, Cinderella Ate My Daughter and Waiting for Daisy as well asFlux: Women on Sex, Work, Kids, Love and Life in a Half-Changed World and the classic SchoolGirls: Young Women, Self-Esteem and the Confidence Gap. A contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine, Peggy has also written for such publications as The Los Angeles Times, Vogue, Elle, Time, Mother Jones, Slate, O: The Oprah Magazine, and The New Yorker, and has contributed commentaries to NPR’s All Things Considered and the PBS Newshour. Her articles have been anthologized multiple times, including in The Best American Science Writing.