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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.

Free sample

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 (1,274)

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View all
The Stone Witch of Florence
The Seventh Veil of Salome
Hera
The Lion Women of Tehran
The Return of Ellie Black
Annie Bot
More
Bright Young Women
The First Ladies
Lady Tan’s Circle of Women
Weyward
Queen of Thieves
Hester
Love on the Brain
Bronze Drum
The Bodyguard
The Change
Lessons in Chemistry
Kaikeyi
My Body
Half Sick of Shadows
The Girl with Stars in Her Eyes
Outlawed
More Myself
Practical Magic
A Rogue of One's Own
True Story
Fleishman Is in Trouble
The Book of Longings
Untamed
The Kingdom of Back
The Girl with the Louding Voice
Throw Like a Girl
Trick Mirror
Bringing Down the Duke
Three Women
Shout
Thick
Still Lives
The Rules of Magic
The Nightingale