Stretch: The Unlikely Making of a Yoga Dude is an all-true comic memoir about Neal Pollack's adventures in American yoga culture and his more or less sincere, middle-aged search for his "best self." Like his other books, this one contains plenty of profanity, drug use, and scatological humor, yet also describes the subtle, but very real, transformation that Pollack underwent during his near-decade of yoga practice.

About Stretch:
Years after achieving literary stardom as the author of The Neal Pollack Anthology of American Literature, Neal has fallen into a rut. He's overweight, the hair on his head is thinning, and the hair on his face is pretentious—all of which a New York Times critic points out while panning his second book, Never Mind the Pollacks. The nasty review, combined with the complete failure of his attempt to become the front-man for a rock band, leaves Pollack lying facedown in a puddle of his own tears, pounding the mattress and sobbing into his pillow. His wife intervenes by saying: "You should do yoga with me."
"Yoga," he writes, "didn't occur to me, ever. Why would it have? EA Sports had never put out a yoga video game."

Yet, Pollack is desperate enough to try anything—even if it means trying to stand on his head in the exercise room of the Lance Armstrong 24-Hour Fitness in Austin, Texas. As he struggles to master the "alligator pose" and keep from kicking other yogis in the face, Pollack begins to feel better. Soon, he's working his way through the chakra system and coming closer and closer, he believes, to dharma megha samadhi, "a state of enlightened bliss where the ego separates from the self and the practitioner realizes that he's powerless to control the vagaries of an endlessly shifting universe."

There's much to mock in yoga culture, and Pollack don't hold back in Stretch. He spends many pages satirizing the yuppie, New-Age pretension, excessive commercialism, and lame music that sometimes seems to dominate the yoga world…. But ee volunteers at his neighborhood yoga studio, attends a "yoga Olympics" in an airport hotel ballroom, goes to yoga conferences and yoga rock shows, becomes a reporter for Yoga Journal magazine, goes on a two-week yoga retreat to Thailand, and, finally, starts teaching yoga himself. He also encounters quite a few famous teachers, many of whom appear in Stretch, including Bikram Choudhury, David Life and Sharon Gannon, Richard Freeman, Shiva Rea, Steve Ross, Duncan Wong, and a host of others. Through all the silliness, he describes how he became a sincere practitioner and how he's undergone a profound personal transformation.

About the author:
Neal Pollack is the author of the bestselling memoir Alternadad and several acclaimed books of satirical fiction, including the cult classic The Neal Pollack Anthology of American Literature and the rock-n-roll novel Never Mind the Pollacks. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Vanity Fair, GQ, Details, Men's Journal, Maxim, Salon.com, Slate.com, and many other magazines and websites. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife and son.