‘I wanted sexual adventures, I didn’t want to fall in love’: Molly Roden Winter on her astonishing memoir of an open marriage

An open marriage, dating sites, sex with strangers – now the writer’s fearsomely frank and funny memoir about the joys of polyamory has become an instant bestseller

Molly Roden Winter wasn’t planning an extramarital affair. Certainly not a string of sexual encounters with multiple partners, each liaison now intricately catalogued in the public domain. When she stormed out of her Brooklyn home one evening in 2008 – kids crashed out upstairs, husband barely through the front door – it was space, not sex, she desperately craved. “The night this all started,” she tells me, “my husband, Stew, had worked late. And I was pissed off. He’d promised to be home early.” Once again, he’d returned early enough for her to still be awake (for dinner, TV and sex, maybe), but too late to help put the children to bed.

She was 35 then, a middle-school English teacher with two young sons, aged six and three. “I’d taken some time out of work to raise the kids and soon felt lost. I forgot who I was outside motherhood. I felt so devoted to my children. I loved being a parent. I was also angry that my husband got to continue having this whole other life while I did not.” Her husband, a successful writer of music for television, had become the family’s breadwinner; her teacher’s income would hardly have covered the cost of childcare. “It would have made no sense for him to stay home and one of us needed to. But something was bubbling up.” She’d started to suffer migraines, occasionally hives – “a physical expression of my bottled up angst. That night, I’d had enough.” She had no predetermined destination. “I was so out of sorts I didn’t even take my phone or wallet. The second he walked in, I went out.”