Flux

Women on Sex, Work, Love, Kids and Life in a Half-Changed World

“I loved it just as much as Schoolgirls. It’s brilliant, fascinating, touching, wonderfully composed.”
—Anne Lamott, Operating Instructions

“Women are often the ones who do the heavy work when it comes to talking about life, love, work, families and that elusive thing called balance. How lucky we are that it is Peggy Orenstein who is listening in, recording her impressions and conclusions in her clear prose. Flux is a fascinating book that reveals the stresses and pleasures of choice and responsibility for both women and men in the modern age.” —Jane Hamilton, A Map of the World

AT THIRTY-FOUR, Peggy Orenstein faced a series of dilemmas shared by many women of her generation: She was unsure whether she wanted children, unsure about the impact of motherhood on her career, her relationship, and her sense of self. Why, when women seemed to have so many choices, did she suddenly feel that she had none? After feminist liberation and its subsequent backlash, she realized that women’s lives, including her own, were now in a state of flux.

In her second book, Orenstein looks at what it means to be a woman at the beginning of a new century. After talking to over two hundred women between the ages of twenty-five and forty-five, she has blended their voices into a compelling narrative that allows the reader to ‘eavesdrop’ — to get deep inside the lives and choices of other women — and share their thoughts on ambition and power, the experience of sex and love, the meaning of motherhood, what it means to remain single and childless, and how these things influence the way we assemble the pieces of our lives.

In Flux: Women on Sex, Work, Love, Kids and Life in a Half-Changed World, Orenstein explores the half-changed aspect of today’s world and the ways women still struggle to live full lives and to reach a true balance of the personal and professional. With richly textured narrative portraits and extraordinary depth of reporting, this book offers an opportunity to take part in a conversation with women across generations and lines of experience, an exchange that rarely happens these days.

For all women who are looking for insight into their lives and the forces that inform them, Flux has the power to inspire discussion and, through illuminating the key conflicts of real women, show how life might be changed. Only Peggy Orenstein, with her narrative gift and unique reportorial skills, could produce such a cutting-edge book, a true blueprint for how women comport themselves as the century turns, a bible for stressed-out women trying to make important decisions.

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