Position

Crackling with intelligence and humor, The Position is the masterful story of one extraordinary family at the hilarious height of the sexual revolution — and through the thirty-year hangover that followed.

In 1975, Paul and Roz Mellow write a bestselling Joy of Sex-type book that mortifies their four school-aged children and ultimately changes the shape of the family forever. Thirty years later, as the now dispersed family members argue over whether to reissue the book, we follow the complicated lives of each of the grown children and their conflicts in love, work, marriage, parenting, and, of course, sex — all shadowed by the indelible specter of their highly sexualized parents. Insightful, panoramic, and compulsively readable, The Position is an American original.

Sex, love, the 1970s,
and one extraordinary family
that lived to tell the tale

Crackling with intelligence and original humor, The Position is a masterful take on sex and the suburban American family at the hilarious height of the sexual revolution and throughout the thirty-year hangover that followed. Meg Wolitzer, the author of the much-acclaimed novel The Wife (named a notable book of the year by The New York Times Book Review, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, and Newsday), takes another huge step forward with this new book and showcases her distinctive voice, pitch-perfect observations, electric wit, and depth of emotion.

In 1975, suburban parents Paul and Roz Mellow write a Joy of Sex-type book called Pleasuring: One Couple's Journey to Fulfillment, which becomes a surprise runaway bestseller. The Position opens with the four Mellow children, aged six to fifteen, at the moment when they see the mortifying book (and the graphic, pastel illustrations of their parents' creative, vigorous lovemaking) for the very first time -- an experience that will forever complicate their ideas about sex, parents, families, and themselves. The book brings a strange celebrity and small fortune ("sex money" the children call it) to the Mellows and ultimately changes the shape of the family forever.
Thirty years later, as the now-dispersed family members argue about whether to reissue the book, we follow the complicated lives of each of the grown children as they confront their own struggles with love, work, sex, death, and the indelible early specter of their erotically charged parents.

Some novels are about family, and others are about sex. The Position is about sex within the context of a family. Insightful, witty, panoramic, and heartbreaking, it is a compulsively readable novel about an eternally mystifying subject: how a group of people growing up in one house can become so very different from one another.

The Washington Post - Lisa Zeidner

At one point, Michael complains about his mother: "that combination of hypersensitivity and pushiness -- what could you do with it?" As an authorial presence, Wolitzer is motherly in the best way: engaged, caring, but never intrusive or judgmental. She may love all of the seven children of her novels equally, but The Position is certainly her richest and most substantial.

Not one to dally, Meg Wolitzer graduated from Brown University in 1981 -- and published her debut novel, Sleepwalking, the following year. Since then, she's written several more novels, as well as short stories and screenplays, and has taught writing at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop and Skidmore College.