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More by Molly Roden Winter

Memoir

More

Debut

We love supporting debut authors. Congrats, Molly Roden Winter, on your first book!

by Molly Roden Winter

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Quick take

Follow one woman’s messy and emotionally riveting navigation of open marriage towards self-discovery and acceptance.

Good to know

  • Illustrated icon, Feminist

    Feminist

  • Illustrated icon, Salacious

    Salacious

  • Illustrated icon, Marriage_Issues

    Marriage issues

  • Illustrated icon, NYC

    NYC

Synopsis

Molly Roden Winter was a mom of two young children in Park Slope, Brooklyn, with a husband, Stewart, who often worked late. One night when Stewart missed the kids’ bedtime, again, she stormed out of the house to clear her head. At impromptu drinks with a friend, she met Matt, an unbelievably hot younger man. When Molly told her husband that Matt had asked her out, she was surprised that he encouraged her to accept.

So begins Molly’s unexpected open marriage, and with it a life-changing journey of self-discovery. Molly and Stewart, who also begins to see other people, set ground rules to start: Don’t date an ex. Don’t date someone you work with. Don’t go to anyone’s house. And above all, don’t fall in love. Spoiler alert: They end up breaking most of their rules, even the most important one.

Molly follows her sexual desire onto dating sites and to public places around New York City. In therapy sessions, fueled by the discovery that her parents had an open marriage, too, she grapples with her past and what it means to be both a mother and her truest self. Molly Roden Winter narrates her journey with warmth and style in this magnetic, intensely personal debut memoir.

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Get an early look from the first pages of More.

More

PROLOGUE

Mom? Are you there?

Mom? Where are you?

Mom, I need to talk to you.

Mom, please call me.

When the plane from LaGuardia touches down in Houston, I take my phone out of airplane mode and watch texts pile up like a deck of cards.

Text from Daniel, text from Daniel, from Daniel, from Daniel, from Daniel . . .

Mom, are you and Dad in an open marriage?

This is not Plan A. This is not even Plan W. This is, to put it mildly, cause for panic.

I follow the course of action I always take when faced with an unsolvable dilemma. I reach out to my husband, Stewart.

First, I take a screenshot of the texts. Underneath, I write, WTF?! What should I do?

Shit, he writes back. Do you want to call me?

I stumble off the plane, looking frantically for a place to collect myself—my water bottle and plane garbage, my thoughts and dignity. I find a spot against the wall, flanked by departure and arrival information boards.

The phone doesn’t ring before Stew picks up.

“Oh, baby,” he says. The sympathy in his voice reaches me through the phone. Stew knows how much I don’t want to have this conversation with Daniel. He makes me an offer that’s hard to refuse: “How about if I call him?”

“No, I’m the one he’s asking. Maybe some TV show put the idea in his head and I can wriggle out of it.”

“He’s a mature kid. It’ll be fine no matter what. I can talk to him later, too, okay?”

“Okay, thanks.”

“I love you, my baby.” And after sixteen years of marriage—after everything we’ve been through—I know in my marrow that this is true.

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Why I love it

The first time I read the description of More, I blushed. I love memoir, but I’m not a huge romance reader, so I wasn’t sure I’d enjoy a book that opens with a hot guy asking out the married author at a bar. But I was quickly drawn in by the book’s earnest tone and swift plot and soon discovered the book delivered on so many fronts—it is not only unabashedly sexy but also soul-searching, honest, and deeply relatable.

Molly Roden Winter was just your average Brooklyn mom of two—stressed and overworked but mostly holding it together—when she and her husband decided to make a dramatic change: open their marriage. They attempted to tackle this shift systematically, setting rules about where and when to go on dates with other people, keeping the divide between home life and “extracurricular” life as clean and emotionally uncomplicated as possible. But things don’t stay simple for long. Along the way, Winter realizes how much she has been neglecting her own needs to the detriment of her and her family.

More is about balancing external expectations and true desire, about the messiness of love and ambition in the modern age. It has everything I love in a memoir—a genuine, driving narrative voice, a window into a unique world, and a perpetually amusing set of side characters (in the form of Winter’s dates). Whether you’re curious about “the lifestyle” or happily monogamous, this book is an entertaining, emotional, surprising book that you’ll devour in one sitting.

Member ratings (1,361)

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Debut authors
View all
This Time Next Year
All We Were Promised
Shark Heart
Lessons in Chemistry
As Long as the Lemon Trees Grow
How to End a Love Story
Ink Blood Sister Scribe
The Stone Witch of Florence
A Flicker in the Dark
Honey
A Thousand Times Before
Ariadne
The Wishing Game
The Collected Regrets of Clover
The Days I Loved You Most
The Road of Bones
Thistlefoot
Dinner for Vampires
The Wives
Adelaide
Here After
Spitting Gold
The Ministry of Time
Did I Ever Tell You?
Middletide
The Teller of Small Fortunes
Northwoods
This Spells Love
A Short Walk Through a Wide World
The Storm We Made
Dirty Diana
Neighbors and Other Stories
The Husbands
More
You, Again
The Love Hypothesis
Red, White & Royal Blue
The Other Valley
Hard by a Great Forest
Maame
The Circus Train
The Mayor of Maxwell Street
The Other Black Girl
Weyward
The Push
Age of Vice
The Lost Apothecary
Did You Hear About Kitty Karr?
One Day in December
Paper Names
We Are the Brennans
Black Cake
The Last Russian Doll
Olga Dies Dreaming
She Started It
Bringing Down the Duke
Somebody's Daughter
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Beautiful Country
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Lunar Love
Kaikeyi
River Sing Me Home
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The Stranger Upstairs
Damnation Spring
The Maid
The Verifiers
A Little Hope
In Every Mirror She's Black
Taste Makers
Fiona and Jane
Yinka, Where Is Your Huzband?
Camp Zero
The Last Story of Mina Lee
The Final Revival of Opal & Nev
My Body
Honey Girl
Vladimir
Big Friendship
Black Buck
White Ivy
Three Women
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Peach Blossom Spring
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The Mothers
The Animators
Marlena
Sharp Objects
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