The room was a toasty 102°F. The air was thick with the exertions of two-dozen hardworking , mostly midlife women who were inhaling, exhaling, grunting and groaning their way through a vigorous series of twenty-six yoga poses. I was one of the grunters. This was my first foray into Bikram or hot yoga, a ninety-minute work-out performed in a high-temp, steamy environment said to enhance both muscle flexibility and detoxification through (let’s be classy about this) “profuse perspiration.” I was dripping onto my yoga mat, creating little puddles as I moved from posture to posture, leaving sweaty hand and footprints in my wake. During one particularly challenging downward dog sequence, I slipped, slid across my puddled mat, managed a spectacular face-plant and gave myself a bloody nose.
My Year of Hypnosis, Hormones, Dark Chocolate, and Other Adventures in the World of Anti-Aging
Featured, New York Times Science Section
Guided by both intense curiosity and heathy skepticism, Kessler sets out separate the hope from the hype of the “anti-aging” using herself as a guinea pig.
The Reviews are In…
“Lauren Kessler’s bold, badass take on aging solves one of our greatest modern dilemmas: how to stay young and vibrant without spending the rest of our lives obsessing over how to stay young and vibrant. I feel a decade younger just having read it.”
—Karen Karbo, author of In Praise of Difficult Women
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Lauren Kessler has journeyed to the far frontiers of the anti-aging movement and, using herself as an ever-willing guinea pig, delivers insights that are at once funny, reassuring, practical and real.
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A Grip of Time is a beautiful, tender-hearted story of a group of prisoners for whom writing became their lifeline. Lauren Kessler avoids all the usual tropes in writing about prison, and has written a keenly observed and deeply felt narrative about what it means to be locked up for life. This book, so original and so compelling, took hold of me, and wouldn’t let me go. It was revelatory.
