A hot new book asks: Can polyamory save this marriage? Seeing other people
Phoebe Maltz Bovy reviews More by Molly Roden Winter
I t’s easy to feel like the world’s last re- maining square when reading the many polyamory articles that have appeared recently. They first started cropping up in all those publications with New York in the name (the New Yorker , the New York Times , New York magazine, and the New York Post). Stories multiplied from there—the last one I saw was in the National Post . These days, everyone allegedly has multiple concurrent romantic and sexual relation- ships, or wishes they did. What gives? The impetus for this new wave of media interest in non-monogamy is a new book, More: A Memoir of Open Marriage , by the debut American author Molly Roden Winter. Lots of books take on sexy subject matter and don’t get anything like this degree of press. Some credit must go to a publicity team, but the book itself pulls its weight. The clever twist in this new addition to the genre is that Winter, a married mother of two now-young-adult sons, arrives at extramarital adventures as a wide-eyed novice. The reader meets a woman who’d barely been with anyone other than her husband—one who is too embarrassed to buy condoms at her local pharmacy and too
before her about the drawbacks, auton- omy-wise, of such an arrangement. There is a whole literature on Jews and polyamory: in the Bible, in history, and in modern-day secular and religious settings. Does More belong on that shelf? Else- where, Winter has mentioned converting to Judaism , but there’s no discussion of this in the book itself. Winter keeps things simple, spirituality-wise, and sticks with her conversion to polyamory, and to a side plot about her mother’s own arguably more compelling finding-herself journey into a Japanese cult. Jewishness only comes up when she mentions that Mitchell’s last name suggests he’s Jewish (this is never confirmed, nor brought up again), and in what I think is meant to serve as the meet- cute story of how she got together with her now-husband. Is it cute? Judge for yourself. Winter writes that when she first met Stewart, she assessed that he wasn’t her “type,” because “he fit every negative stereotype of a Long Island Jew.” This, for her, apparently means having a problem- atic sense of humour and wearing pleated pants. (I may be a Manhattan Jew by birth but I am guilty on both counts.) It’s meant
shy to visit a local sex toy shop. But she’s an eager pupil. She devours Dossie Easton and Janet Hardy’s 1997 bestseller The Ethical Slut —a Gen X sensation that kicked off the last wave of media interest in open relationships—mind-blown to learn that polyamory exists at all. While sometimes this aw-shucks stance reads as disingenu- ous (she also mentions having gone to a sex club with her now-husband years prior), the easily scandalized narrator allows the book to read like a journey. If you’re picturing an erotic romp, you will be disappointed. More reads as a cautionary tale about what can happen— doesn’t always, but can—when a woman is financially dependent on her husband. In tenor if not artistry of writing, it’s of a piece with poet Maggie Smith’s bestselling 2023 divorce memoir, You Could Make This Place Beautiful . While the couple at the centre of More stays together, it’s very much the same how-do-these-things-still-happen story of a smart, well-educated woman who marries a high-earning man, has a couple of kids, and tells herself she has accepted her role as the submissive-in-the-unsexy- sense one in the marriage—only to have the same realization as countless women
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