Book Review: More: A Memoir of Open Marriage
Tina Nouri-Mahdavi ‘25
Photo courtesy of Ysabella Beatriz Chiongbian Punzalan ‘24
★★★★☆
Molly Roden Winter’s debut memoir, More: A Memoir of Open Marriage enthralls and bewilders the reader with a tale of a domestic, hetero-normative couple exploring their boundaries and their desires by experimenting with and embracing polyamory.
The memoir follows Molly and her husband Stewart from the very beginnings of their encounters with polyamory—Molly’s relationship with a young man who hits on her acting as the inciting incident—and follows nearly ten or more years of the tumultuous relationship the pair have with themselves, each other and the people they choose to invite into their lives as sexual and romantic partners outside of their marriages.
The memoir is structured as a classic ‘journey’: there is a clear beginning where emotions are muddled and Molly’s attitude towards polyamory harbors resentment towards everyone involved, including herself; then, Molly, with the help of her therapist, Mitchell, as well as the support of her loving mother and husband, comes to terms with what it means for her—a suburban white Park Slope mother whose life has been dominated by her children—to allow her desires to come to light and explore herself as an individual person and a sexual being.
Through many partners and many conjoining but also conflicting feelings of love, jealousy, empathy and generosity, Molly explores the ways in which her repressed, monogamy-centric view of love and sex have coincided with other aspects of her life. She reflects upon her people-pleasing upbringing, her parents’ relationship and her treatment of her husband Stewart as a means of familiarizing herself with and embracing polyamory for her marriage.
The strengths of the book derive from the shining beam of light that is Molly’s voice narrating her journey. In the tradition of memoir’s serving as an outward display of self-reflection, Molly uses this opportunity to not portray herself in a light that makes her favorable to the reader—although her wit, openness and transparency do render her extremely likable—but rather she puts herself on the page in such an authentic and true way that one is almost skeptical of the degree of truth. She doesn’t shield her flaws and the ways in which polyamory did not, at first, work for her; she does not censor her own mistakes and misunderstandings of the world of polyamory. Molly’s voice comes through as almost a tangible aspect of the book precisely because she uses it to give a full, undoctored image of what polyamory means for her, her marriage and the secondary relationships she has with other men.
On the contrasting side, her main flaw in the telling of the story is that it feels slightly rushed. Ten years of time is so much to pack into less than three hundred pages, and in doing just that, Molly has made the timeline and the progression of her development as a person, as well of the development of her marriage, muddy and hard to trace. That being said, even with covering such a vast length of time, Molly is able to give clear pictures of the pivotal moments of this aspect of her life.
It is hard, though, to say that this memoir gives a clear picture of “open marriage” as a whole, as the title suggests, rather than just a specific open marriage, the union of these two people and their explorations outside of their relationship. Polyamory, as Molly references briefly and sporadically throughout the book, is so subjective to the people within the polyamorous unit. The “rules,” the expectations and the reality of the experience cannot be generalized and understood solely through Molly’s story. Molly’s experience—albeit an experience beautifully memorialized through this book—should serve as not the reference point but a reference point of insight into the experience of a polyamorous relationship. Molly surely did not intend for that to be the case—she often shares how much information there is on the subject, how she is only a novice, referencing more “experienced” polyamorists as well as the book The Ethical Slut—but it remains important to note the variety and diversity that is inherent to polyamory. Molly’s account, however, still illustrates a portrayal of her own experience that is worth reading for a glimpse into the world of polyamory, and the ways it freed Molly from the constraints of womanhood, domesticity and repressed sexuality.