Fuck the Higher Bird: A Review of 'Yoga Bitch' by Suzanne Morrison

More often than not on this blog, I've reviewed genre fiction-- that is, sci-fi or fantasy or something other than straight-up "literary" fiction. What I've never done is review nonfiction, simply because I don't, as a rule, read nonfiction. David Sedaris notwithstanding, my experience with other people's memoirs has more often than not been an exercise in eyerolling at the self-aggrandizing navel-gazing contained therein. Memoir is what people write when they think they're more special than they are.

When I went to the AWP conference in Seattle this past February, I went to a panel about book reviews where the editors of several review publications offered advice on how to make reviews pop. The best piece of advice I got was that a review shouldn't be a summary of the events of a book-- it should frame the book in context. Simply laying out the events of the book isn't enough; you can get that by going to Amazon. A good review tells a reader not if the book is good or bad, but why it's relevant.

It was also at AWP that I, on a whim, attended a panel on humor in memoir, and got to hear Suzanne Morrison read from her book Yoga Bitch. When I tell you I laughed so hard I cried, I'm not exaggerating. Her sarcasm, her unflinching honesty about her own inner failings, and most of all, the unbelievable story of a group full of grown adults who willingly drink their own pee, had me hooked.



But more than the humor, it was the whole framework of the book I found myself drawn to. As someone with an overdeveloped self-inspection drive, I spend a lot of time thinking about my weaknesses, my shortcomings, and the ways in which I am a fallible and flawed human being. (Less time gets spent doing anything about that contemplation than I'd like-- hence why I constantly have so much fodder for said contemplation.) Yoga Bitch's back copy advertises the story of a woman who goes to a two-month yoga retreat looking for her higher self, and ends up finding her lower self instead. I thought-- well, okay, at least it'll be funny. But no matter how funny it is, there's got to be a moral at the end, right? Isn't that what memoirs do? Spend two hundred pages on a rambling trip down memory lane and then present The Lesson To Be Learned In All Of This?

But even my apprehension about memoir paled beside how badly I needed a laugh. Once I had the book in my hands, I couldn't wait to crack it open. I poured a glass of wine and went to sit on my front porch. Within a minute, I was laughing. But I'd seen Suzanne read at AWP; I knew I was going to laugh. What I didn't expect was to be crying less than forty pages later, or to be brought to tears several times throughout the course of the book. Because Yoga Bitch isn't just funny-- it's also painfully, brutally relevant, at least to the mind and heart of an agnostic thirty-year-old with a cripplingly nasty fear of intimacy, death, and change.

Just saying, I doubt this guy does yoga.

When I picked up Yoga Bitch, I was expecting more self-help, less spirituality. Maybe it was the jocular tone of the passage Morrison had read at the panel; maybe I fell for the blurb's emphasis on her earthly vices and assumed this would be a practical examination of how to make peace with your inability to give up wine and bacon. (And when I say your inability...)  Instead, I found myself mired in the struggle of a woman desperate to find something to believe in, and terrified of what might happen if she does.

That resonated in a way I hadn't been prepared to acknowledge. Like Morrison, I was raised Catholic; also like Morrison, I've long since given it up. I still consider myself interested in having a spiritual life, but haven't found a faith practice I've felt comfortable committing to (though admittedly I haven't looked that hard). I'm too skeptical, too worried that joining a faith community will force me to claim belief in things I'm just not sure I believe. How can I believe in God after 9/11, after my parents' divorce, after my abusive relationship?

A good friend of mine is going to be ordained later this month as a Unitarian Universalist minister. I've gone to hear her preach, and spent the entire time unsure of what I was feeling. Church spaces are comfortingly familiar the way that any childhood touchstone is-- the smell of incense, the true quiet that's hard to find almost anywhere else. The multifaith nature of the UU services appealed to me on an intellectual level-- but I found it hard to take any of it seriously. My friend standing on the pulpit, speaking from the heart; lighting candles with the other congregants in silence while we held our intentions in our hearts; those things felt real. But the chipper greetings from total strangers, the invocations to a panoply of higher powers, the singing and clapping and tambourines-- I had a hard time not snickering in my head. Did that make me a shitty person? Probably. A flawed person, certainly. One to be pitied, absolutely, even and especially by myself.

There's a certain defensiveness that comes with owning your agnosticism to people whose faith is strong, especially when you used to be a faithful person yourself. I don't mind admitting I miss it-- the ability to go to church and feel at peace instead of out of place-- or that I've berated myself, raged at myself, wondering where along the line my faith deserted me.

On her yoga retreat in Bali, Morrison confronts these same questions-- and comes up nearly as empty-handed as I have. Far from ending her story with a moral, with "and then I figured it all out", she gave me permission for the confusion to continue. It's okay not to know if you believe, she seemed to tell me-- for her, it was enough to come back from Bali able to admit that she /wanted/ to believe. And maybe that's enough for me, too.

It sounds such a cliche to say "It was like she knew me!" but that's actually how I felt. I felt understood. I felt indescribably reassured by having read her book-- that it's okay for me to be thirty and feel like I have not a single clue what I'm doing with my life, it's okay for me not to know if I believe in a god, it's okay for me to feel fucked up and scared and depressed sometimes because-- hey, guess what? Everyone does. Even our gurus, the people we look to for guidance and inspiration, are just fucked up humans like the rest of us.

If there's a moral to Yoga Bitch, it's this simultaneously difficult yet comforting concept: that there is no 'right way' to fulfillment. There's just your own ability to be honest about the questions you're asking of the universe, to keep searching for your answers, and to not give up hope that you'll find them.

You can buy Yoga Bitch on Amazon, and read my reviews crossposted to Goodreads.