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 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.”

She added, “I think that it’s worth investigating what interests you as a human being with the understanding that you don’t have to jump from one end of the spectrum to another.”

Winter and Stewart married in 1998. According to her, More began to take shape in 2019, following a rough timeline from 2008, when they opened their marriage, to 2018. Drawing inspiration from her journal entries before marriage—back when she had more time, before kids—Winter said she found a disconnect between what she wrote down and how she remembers feeling.

She explained, “My husband, and I visited a sex club, and I was going to write about that experience. My memory of it was so negative, and the way I wrote about it in my journal was so positive.”

The sex club in question was Le Trapeze, immortalized in Candace Bushnell’s first “Sex and the City” column for the New York Observer. The topic comes up at a point in the book when Winter feels like she might lose her husband, a new boyfriend, and the comforts of her life to non-monogamy.

“It hurts to share Stewart, and it hurts to lose Matt,” Winter writes after a particularly embarrassing moment when she sent the wrong text to the wrong person. But even more, Winter writes about being scared of the feeling of being “shiny and new” in someone else’s eyes. In that moment, Stewart attempts to level her with the memory of Le Trapeze, but they are on different pages emotionally.

“Right now, I’m remembering the two hookers in the ladies’ room who talked about their hopes for the evening: that the johns who’d brought them there would take them to McDonald’s,” Winter writes before telling Stewart, “I didn’t like Le Trapeze.”

“What? That’s not true,” he responds. “If it were, we wouldn’t have gone twice. There were things you liked, and things you didn’t like. It’s the same with dating other people.”

At the end of the conversation, Winter decides that she wants to go back to therapy.

Winter grew up in Evanston, Illinois, with two teachers for parents. “It was the suburbs,” she said, adding, “It was the ’70s.” She describes herself as “bookish,” “nerdy” and generally left out of what her peers were doing because she skipped a grade. As a result, she was much younger than her peers. “So I went to high school when I was 12 and went to college when I was 16.” she said. “Too young.” An English language and literature major at the University of Michigan, she had a serious boyfriend for four years, and then she was 23 when she met Stewart, who is five years older.

“I was very nerdy in high school, so I knew other people were going to prom. But no one asked me,” she explained. “I knew from my sister that other people were dating and having sex, and I was terrified of it.”

As a result, Winter explained that she became very shy and found her self-esteem in being booksmart. Then Stewart changed everything. “I had never felt what I felt with Stewart,” she said. “And there has never been a doubt in my mind that he is the right person for me but also, and we’ve talked about this a lot, I also don’t think there is only one for everybody.” Stewart felt the same way early on in their relationship.

From Long Island, Stewart writes music for film and TV. After falling in love, they stayed in Manhattan for five years before moving to Park Slope in February 2002, 10 days before Winter gave birth to her first child.

After 9/11, “There was a lot of people fleeing the city,” Winter explained. “We had a baby coming, and I was teaching at the time, so I wanted to work part-time, and I didn’t want to have a two-hour commute.” Somewhere between her first and second child, and all the mommy duties in between, Winter writes about beginning to lose her sense of self and sense of adventure in the shuffle. Then after meeting Matt 10 years into her marriage, she began to think about a conversation she first had with Stewart about non-monogamy.

“It was one of those conversations leading up to us living together,” Winter explained about their first talk about non-monogamy. “I was like, I’ll convert to Judaism because I don’t even know what religion I am anymore. Judaism sounds normal. We were talking about stuff like that, hitting the big ones. Kids, yes. Religion, check. And then, monogamy is a good conversation to have.”

For Stewart, sleeping with someone else while married was not a deal breaker, but keeping it from him was. For Winter, as she details in her book, it wasn’t so black and white. “I was more jealous always and more insecure,” she said, and she wears that jealousy on her sleeve in More. She writes honestly about being excited about her new sexual freedom with Matt but also about being threatened by Stewart’s sex with another woman, Lena.

“I don’t think I should have told you about Lena,” Stewart tells her in the book. “I’m into hearing about you and Matt, but I know you don’t feel the same way about me being with another woman.”

About the contradiction, Winter admitted, “You can’t have it both ways. I mean, you can try but… I feel like a lot of what I have seen about non-monogamy makes it feel like this is people’s natural inclination. (Some people) always felt like they were kind of at heart, non-monogamous.” It was different for her.

“I was curious is what it came down to,” Winter explained. “And I was willing to do the work to get through the really hard parts of it,” she added, with a little unexpected help from her mother.

When former Vice President Mike Pence said he wouldn’t so much as entertain having lunch alone with someone of the opposite sex, even the most conservative of Americans clutched their pearls over someone not being secure enough in their marriage for lunch.

“Of course, there’s a huge difference between a business lunch and a romantic dinner (or a wild night on the town),” wrote The Daily Beast columnist Matt Lewis. And Vice President Kamala Harris would have a considerably more difficult time getting anything done if she took such a stance. But ultimately, Winter confirmed, “that kind of thinking exists” for many straight couples.

Photo Illustration by Luis G. Rendon/The Daily Beast/Getty/Courtesy of the author

“I talked to some of my friends who are not sexually non-monogamous but who have developed friendships with people of the opposite sex. Jealousy can come up,” she explained. “Even just that is a toe-dip in non-monogamy, having some interpersonal intimacy with somebody. And this is such a hetero situation because it’s like, it exists in hetero relationships.”

Growing up, Winter said remembers her parents having friends of the opposite sex. “My father had close female friends, and my mother had close male friends. I thought that was cool, and I thought it was something that I wanted for myself.” But as it turns out, there was more to their story. In the book, Winter recounts learning that her parents had a non-monogamous arrangement of their own in which her mother was allowed to see a man named Jim.

“Even though she had my dad’s explicit permission, she still called her relationship with Jim an ‘affair,’” she writes. “I could hear the shame in her voice when she told me, as if the encouragement of your husband hardly mattered.”

Winter’s mother was 22 and a virgin when she married Winter’s father in 1965. “And so it was kind of similar in that my dad had more experience than she had,” she said, and seeing how much her parents have overcome obstacles and grown together made her more hopeful about how her marriage to Stewart could evolve.

“They have, I think, one of the strongest marriages I’ve ever seen, and I think part of it is that freedom that they gave each other,” said Winter. “Once I learned of it, I was able to start talking to my mother about it, and they did have a lot of difficult conversations and tough moments and tears and all of those things, but they are still married today.”

Regardless of her early struggles with non-monogamy, Winter knew she didn’t want to stop being married to Stewart. “I could also start seeing that it was good for him, too, and that he was happier,” she said. “I knew that from my own mother that it was possible for me to get through this and see something great on the other side.”

When it comes to non-monogamy relationships and in marriage, Winter acknowledges that gay people seemed to have a leg up on normalizing the practice and making it their own. But for many straight couples, it has become akin to “coming out,” a phrase Winter said she uses reluctantly. “Because my intention is not to co-op it from other groups that have had to come out with a lot more risk and potential negative consequences,” she said. “But I don’t know of another term to use because that’s the way it has felt.”

In American Poly (Oxford University Press, 2023), polyamory is described plainly as a “subset of intimate or romantic relationship styles that fall under the umbrella of ethical non-monogamy”—the “ethical” part being that sex outside the relationship is agreed upon by both parties. Recent studies have found one in five Americans have experimented with some arrangement of non-monogamy, but when it’s a public-facing figure the details of such arrangements can quickly become fodder for discussion about what’s “normal” and accepted in marriage.

After announcing their separation last year, former NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio and his wife Chirlane McCray shocked even more people by forgoing a divorce to simply date other people. In her 2023 memoir, Middle of the Rainbow—How a Wife, Mother, and Daughter Managed to Find Herself and Win Two Emmys, actress Bonnie Bartlett Daniels detailed her open arrangement with actor husband William Daniels and their respective love affairs. And then Jada Pinkett Smith shocked everyone when—despite a very public “entanglement,” and being separated for years— she denied being in an open marriage with Will Smith.

“It’s always of interest to me how that’s newsworthy,” said Winter. “That’s more of what I notice than actually investigating it.”

During the week that Winter’s book is released, polyamory is the focus of a cheeky New York magazine cover featuring kitties, and the ladies of “The View” discuss the subject more with distaste than depth. “How many orgasms can one girl fake?” asks 81-year-old host Joy Behar. Yet still, the ladies agree that polyamory seems to be catching on from what statistics show, and anyone who has ever had a “work husband” or a “crush” on their son’s piano teacher could be knocking on the door of non-monogamy, according to the way Winter’s memoir unfolds.

As much as Winter and Stewart’s extramarital relationships allow them to maintain a sense of self and fulfillment outside their marriage, those relationships are also intimately tied to their happiness together—strengthening their bond as a married couple.

“When people hear my story, I get a lot of confessions from others. And people who have said to me, ‘Well I couldn’t even bring up that topic with my husband. They would flip out if I even brought it up.’ And it’s fear,” said Winter. “The truth is when you get married to somebody, you don’t always know how you’re going to feel in 10 years. All you can do is kind of lay the groundwork of love and mutual trust in honoring that you want to be there for the other person’s growth, wherever that takes them.”

Where Stewart and Winter are now, they are happy together and separately happy in their respective partnerships. “We’ve always maintained our date nights and made sure that we spent time maintaining our physical relationship. And that was important to both of us,” said Winter, explaining that she didn’t want to feel like she had been “supplanted by somebody else.”

“And you know,” she said, leaning in, “we still have great sex. I would be very very sad if we didn’t have sex anymore.”

The Daily Beast/Doubleday