Photo Illustration by Luis G. Rendon/The Daily Beast/Getty
At 51 years old, author Molly Roden Winter has entered an elite club of New Yorkers who have it all—an enviable Park Slope townhouse, a doting, still virile husband, Stewart, and two healthy kiddos crossing the threshold into adulthood. And there’s more. Winter has a longtime boyfriend, Matt, and enough sexual experiences to fill a buzzy new memoir about how non-monogamy made her marriage stronger.
Aptly titled More: A Memoir of Open Marriage (Doubleday, 2024), Winter does more than recount a life-balancing career, kids, husband, and boyfriends in the book. She offers unfiltered emotional analysis—unafraid to delve into the at times painfully awkward moments that punctuate her journey into non-monogamy. Early on, the reader learns that Winter can be jealous, a hypocrite, and a tad resentful. But mostly, Winter is an open book, and More is her attempt to show the like-minded that they can indeed have their cake and eat it too. But being willing to embrace the mess is a big part of the process.
“Almost anything can be polarizing these days,” Winter said recently during a coffee date on her side of Brooklyn. She leans in, “We often want to say we are for this, and we are against that … The gray is starting to disappear from a lot of our discourse, so people saying they believe in the sanctity of monogamy or people should be free to be non-monogamous or whatever. I don’t think it’s that simple.”