Open marriage makes you a better partner... and better in bed

Molly Roden Winter's hit book on polyamory has caused uproar. She tells Katie Strick about sex, jealousy and breaking the news to her sons

MOLLY RODEN WINTER is talking me through some of the more surprising messages she’s received since publishing her bestselling book, More: A Memoir of Open Marriage, which details her steamy decade of sexual adventures after she and her husband, Stewart, decided to open up their 24-year union.

Roden Winter, 52, a former teacher and mother-of-two from Brooklyn, had readied herself for much of the criticism: the attacks on writing about her sons (now 19 and 22), for example, and men calling her a “c***” and a “whore”. But there was one message that stood out to her. It was from a man in his sixties from Texas, who told her he’d initially thought her a “promiscuous and selfish woman” until he read More. “He told me he loved it and that he was glad Stewart and I were still together and that I was a mensch (a good person), and signed off ‘God bless you’,” she chuckles from the kitchen of her chic New York townhouse.

“It made me happy to have reached someone who is not my target demographic and who was pre-disposed not to like my book but was curious enough to read it and then changed his mind… That’s the thing about this book: it makes people angry and I get it — it’s threatening the status quo. And there are lots of ways to shake up the status quo. You absolutely don’t have to open your marriage and I’m not saying every woman should be like me, far from it. I’m saying every woman should be herself.”