More

The first time I read the description of More, I blushed. I love memoir, but I’m not a huge romance reader, so I wasn’t sure I’d enjoy a book that opens with a hot guy asking out the married author at a bar. But I was quickly drawn in by the book’s earnest tone and swift plot and soon discovered the book delivered on so many fronts—it is not only unabashedly sexy but also soul-searching, honest, and deeply relatable.

Molly Roden Winter was just your average Brooklyn mom of two—stressed and overworked but mostly holding it together—when she and her husband decided to make a dramatic change: open their marriage. They attempted to tackle this shift systematically, setting rules about where and when to go on dates with other people, keeping the divide between home life and “extracurricular” life as clean and emotionally uncomplicated as possible. But things don’t stay simple for long. Along the way, Winter realizes how much she has been neglecting her own needs to the detriment of her and her family.

More is about balancing external expectations and true desire, about the messiness of love and ambition in the modern age. It has everything I love in a memoir—a genuine, driving narrative voice, a window into a unique world, and a perpetually amusing set of side characters (in the form of Winter’s dates). Whether you’re curious about “the lifestyle” or happily monogamous, this book is an entertaining, emotional, surprising book that you’ll devour in one sitting.

Molly Roden Winter was a mom of two young children in Park Slope, Brooklyn, with a husband, Stewart, who often worked late. One night when Stewart missed the kids’ bedtime, again, she stormed out of the house to clear her head. At impromptu drinks with a friend, she met Matt, an unbelievably hot younger man. When Molly told her husband that Matt had asked her out, she was surprised that he encouraged her to accept.

So begins Molly’s unexpected open marriage, and with it a life-changing journey of self-discovery. Molly and Stewart, who also begins to see other people, set ground rules to start: Don’t date an ex. Don’t date someone you work with. Don’t go to anyone’s house. And above all, don’t fall in love. Spoiler alert: They end up breaking most of their rules, even the most important one.

Molly follows her sexual desire onto dating sites and to public places around New York City. In therapy sessions, fueled by the discovery that her parents had an open marriage, too, she grapples with her past and what it means to be both a mother and her truest self. Molly Roden Winter narrates her journey with warmth and style in this magnetic, intensely personal debut memoir.