'Right now I love three people': Molly Roden Winter on her controversial open marriage

Molly Roden Winter is talking me through some of the more surprising messages she’s had since publishing her bestselling book More: A Memoir of Open Marriage, which details her rollercoaster decade of sexual adventures after she and her husband, Stewart, decided to open up their 24-year marriage.

The racy, riotous romp of a memoir — described as “breathtakingly candid” by the New York Times and “an unsparing account of a polyamorous life” by The Atlantic — became an instant hit when it was released in the US in January, generating a perhaps inevitable slew of ‘this book will blow up your group chat’ headlines and essays about what it means to authentically desire and whether polyamory was simply becoming latest fad to attempt to hog the so-called cultural duvet.

Roden Winter, 52, a former English teacher and mother-of-two sons from Brooklyn’s upmarket Park Slope neighbourhood, had readied herself for much of the criticism that’s been aimed at her over the book. The attacks on writing about her sons (now 19 and 22), for example, and the comments from men calling her a “c***” and a “whore” (”not a lot of creativity or variety in them, I will say”).

But there was one message that stood out to her in particular. It was from a man in his sixties from , 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 townhouse.