Meet Molly Roden Winter, the best-selling Park Slope polyamorist

By Brian Braiker

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Molly Roden Winter never set out to be the face of Park Slope polyamory, but here we are. Her book “More: A Memoir of Open Marriage” came out earlier this year and instantly hit the best seller lists. It became the subject of think pieces and trend stories. It landed her on talk shows and podcasts and essentially went viral in a way that clearly underscores how thoroughly she has tapped into some kind of zeitgeist.

“I think it’s part of a larger conversation around the conventions that we’ve all inherited and are questioning,” says Winter, who is this week’s guest on “Brooklyn Magazine: The Podcast.”

Winter was a mother of small children with a husband, Stewart, who often worked late. One night when Stewart missed the kids’ bedtime—again—she took herself on a walk house to clear her head. She ran into a friend who took her to a bar where she met Matt, a flirtatious younger man. When Molly told her husband that Matt had asked her out, he told her to go for it. And just like that … they opened up their marriage. Easier said than done, it turns out.

“I did have moments where I was like, I can’t do this anymore,” she says. “There were a lot of things that I could have easily spent my life avoiding if I wanted to, but there was something else there.”

The book is a brutally honest warts-and-all story of her years-long foray into polyamory, sexual liberation, self discovery, love and heartbreak.

The following is a transcript of our conversation, which airs as an episode of “Brooklyn Magazine: The Podcast,” edited for clarity. Listen in the player above or wherever you get your podcasts.

So this book, it’s been out for a minute now. The timing is pretty remarkable. I’m sure you didn’t know this was going to happen or plan for this, but polyamory is having this moment. It’s in the zeitgeist. It’s in all the, you know, big think pieces in the Times, the New Yorker and Vox, New York Magazine, blah, blah. It’s on the Ezra Klein show. Great for you. Why do you think this is happening now? 
I wish I knew exactly because it would make this, well, no, it’s good that I don’t know because it would make it a very boring answer, right? I think it’s part of a larger conversation around the conventions that we’ve all inherited and are questioning. And I don’t think it’s the only thing that’s being questioned. You referred to Ezra Klein and I listened to his interview with the author of “Other Significant Others,” which isn’t polyamory at all. It’s just like, wait a minute. You mean I don’t have to just like live in a nuclear family in this silo and try to make that work economically speaking and otherwise. I think we’re all maybe post-Covid just ready to rattle the cage a little bit. It’s at least adjacent to the gender fluidity that has really come more into the fore in a really positive way, in my opinion. I read 30 percent of Gen Zers identify as queer being either genderqueer or sexuality. I am not that thing that, that I was taught I had to be where I am a woman in a monogamous relationship with a man and I have kids and then I just curl up into a ball and pretend like I don’t exist anymore. That’s the role of women historically that we’re supposed to procreate and then be quiet.

It’s funny that you went right to Gen Z. I know you have kids who are what they’re 22 and 19, something like that.
I live with Gen Z.

Mine are about to turn 19 next week and 15 about to turn 16 next month. It felt like everywhere all of a sudden. And of course we live in a little bit of a bubble in terms of national culture, but you’re absolutely right that this is a generational shift and this non -binaryness feels like it plugs into the binaryness of monogamy.
Absolutely. And I think people can say, it’s like catching, or ideas are getting put in kids’ heads. No, the idea of gender was put in all of our heads. The idea of monogamy was put in all of our heads. And all we’re doing is reevaluating how well those ideas and constructs serve us. And when they don’t, I think it’s fair game to push up against them. It doesn’t mean everybody has to make the same choices. It’s just saying the default settings that I was programmed with, I don’t want them anymore.

The 18-year-old is finishing up their first year in college and they sent me in one of their final essays just to proofread. And it was about the role of women in medieval society, 15th century, 16th century. And it was really about your role is as a vessel to procreate and keep the church populated with parishioners and keep the faith, literally. That’s your job.
I’m reading “Mary Magdalene Revealed” by Meggan Watterson. Mary Magdalene was not a whore. She was the apostle to the apostles. And all she was saying was that you don’t need the church. And so we had to cut her out and create the patriarchy in the fourth century. I have been learning a lot about the history of the Christian church and how patriarchy and monogamy came to be. So all of these things that people say are the way, and they are the way we are naturally built and designed, they were all constructed at some point or another to serve somebody.

One hundred percent. So has your book an option for a movie yet?
[Laughs.] I’m taking a trip to LA next week, let’s just say that. But TV looks a little more enticing, I think, because it’s not a movie, it’s a series. It’s an ongoing series. There are a lot of characters to fit in there if it’s a movie.

Who who’s gonna play you?
I can fantasize, but I don’t wanna jinx it.

Julia Roberts?
Oh God, I don’t think so. The book starts when I was 35, but I think it’s important to me and to whoever is working on the show with me that – and I am working with two producers and co-creators – that we make it a woman who is not made too young. I would love, even if we have to age up the kids or whatever, if we go with 50 year olds. I would love a 50 year old actress so that we’re not just saying, you can only have sex when you’re this young, which is ridiculous.

People have a lot of feelings about this. There’s a lot of fear, which probably stems from insecurity. There’s anger also probably stemming from insecurity. There’s a lot of prurient curiosity. Now that it’s been out and it’s, and it’s got a viral in its own way, do you feels eyes on you walking around Park Slope? Do you feel conspicuous in a way you didn’t before?
It’s almost disappointing how nobody has ever, ever recognized me, except for a woman I went to high school with. Saw me on the streets of Park Slope and was like, “Wait a minute, I think we went to high school together, cause I saw your book. And I was like, you’re the only one. You’re the only one.” No, it’s great. It’s perfect. Nobody cares. Nobody cares in my neighborhood. Even in my family, my parents wanted to ask me something about the book when we were all together and my sister was like, can we please just talk about something else? She doesn’t even want to think about my parents. My parents had to come out to her as having had an open marriage because I was writing the book. So nobody wants to talk about it in my world. So I’m pretty safe.

We’ll get to your parents, because I think that’s fascinating, and I have a question about that. But big picture, it’s not just a book about polyamory. It’s not just about the titillation of it, but it’s about motherhood. It’s about selfhood, self-discovery and polyamory.
Yes, absolutely. And I kind of feel like women memoirs in general are like, “A woman takes a journey through blank and discovers herself.”

This is your “Eat, Pray, Love.”
I just reread, “Eat, pray, Love.” I love a woman’s memoir and I think women are hungry for stories of, how do I find my way back to myself? Because I was told that I had to please everyone else. And I don’t even know who I am. And if I do anything, I’m criticized for being to this or to that. How do I do this? And so Cheryl Strayed walked the Pacific Crest Trail and Elizabeth Gilbert went off on her journeys and different people do different things. And for me, it was opening my marriage. But that’s not to say that’s the way to do it. It’s just to say that was my way that I learned that there was more to me than being a mother and a wife.

My aunt who’s no longer with us wrote a book in the ‘80s called “The Type E Woman.” And the type E woman is everything to everyone. And so it’s not a new phenomenon.
No, we inherited it. It’s the long legacy.

You come by it honestly. I’m a journalist. I love a good lead. The book’s opener is super riveting. I cracked it open and I was like, I’m in instantly. You’re on a flight and you land to a flurry of texts from your son asking you if you’re in an open marriage. Can you take us to that moment? The bottom drops out basically.
The reason I chose to start the book there, and it had a bunch of different beginnings at different points, but that beginning stuck because that was really always my central conflict. I love my kids and I want to be a good mother. And the idea of doing something that was going to hurt them was abhorrent to me. And so it was this real question in my mind: Is having this, some might call unconventional, others might call deviant, sex life going to hurt my kids. And my answer is now no, but at that moment, I was not sure. And the bottom drops out is a good word for it. I was filled with shame. I didn’t know what to say. I was glad he found out then as opposed to a few years prior, because I was at least had done some therapy by then and had a little more of a clue as to what I was doing and why. When we started, we didn’t know the term “open marriage.” We didn’t know the term “ethical non-monogamy.” It was 2008 when we began. And that moment in the book is 2015. So we were seven years in, but I still was trying to really compartmentalize my mom self and my other selves, which is the type E woman.

And it’s natural when the kids are a certain age. They’re not your contemporaries and they’re not your buddies. You do have to compartmentalize at least until they’re, whatever, 19 and 22.
Or 13 in this case. It’s funny because I taught eighth grade for a long time and I always felt like I had different relationships with my students than they had with their parents because I was still in my 30s when I was teaching, 20s, and they would tell me things that they were terrified of their parents knowing. And I was like, “I really do think you can tell your mom that.” You don’t see your parents that way.

And they’ve been around. They’ve had lives before you’ve gotten there. They’ve been to, you know, the Trapeze or whatever.
Which nobody wants to think about, but nobody wants to think about their own parents having sex with each other either. It’s all on the same slippery slope.

It’s a very honest feeling book. I mean, I’m not you, so I’m guessing it’s honest, but it’s very warts -and-all. The tone is honest. You’ve got everything from boogers to butt plugs. It’s hard to write honestly about yourself.
Oof, yeah, my first draft really sucked. I thought it was great. So I sent it to 50 agents and got 50 rejections. My husband was the only one who told me that it wasn’t good. And it was because it wasn’t honest enough. He was like, you’re trying to reassure everybody that everything’s fine. But yes, it’s fine now, but it wasn’t. So maybe you need to lean into that. So I finally figured out that I needed to write it in present tense, which some people say as a no-no. I was going to write it in present tense and then go back and change it. But it worked to get me into it. And I had to lie down and cry sometimes in the middle of writing. I’m a crier, as you know, from reading the book. “Better out than in,” I always say. I definitely wrote it as if nobody was going to read it. And for sure, I wrote it like my parents weren’t going to read it and my children weren’t gonna read it.

It certainly feels that way.
But my parents read it, and my older son read it, but my younger son hasn’t.

I can’t imagine a child of mine reading a book like this. Obviously, he was probably prepared for it and wanted to read it, but how did he respond, or has he told you?
He was great. We had a talk about it. He told me he skipped over the nitty-gritty parts. That was the way he put it. And he was 21 when he read it. He’s met me. So it’s not like entirely shocking. The biggest thing he was surprised about was that I didn’t know what Rough Trade was. There’s a scene where I meet someone at Rough Trade and I was like, “What is this place?” And he was like, “Are you kidding me?” He’s a musician. So he was kind of horrified at that. We had some other talks about some other things. He’s always been a mature kid. That’s the kid I told at the beginning of the book. So he wanted to read it, so I was like, sure, you can. You’re an adult. You can read it.

So let’s get to your story. You start out as almost accidentally polyamorous. And to your point, that term was not common currency in 2008. You take a walk to clear your head one night. You’re pent up, fed up, you’re being the everything-to-everyone woman. You run into a friend outside, being dragged to a bar with that friend. You’re suddenly flirting. What was that moment?
I was not setting out to find my new lover.I forgot my wallet, I forgot my phone, which in 2008 wasn’t really a thing. But I was just walking around and when I got pulled into this bar, I don’t think I had been in a bar without my husband, maybe once or twice. My kids were 6 and 3 at the time.

Not just any bar. The Gate, which I love.
Yes. A little Park Slope color.

I used to live right around the corner on a little Park Slope color. I used to live around the corner on Second Street when my first was born and we would go to J.J. Byrne before it was redesigned. That was gnarly.
That was a real hazard.

Literal dead rats under the slide.
Playing with sticks: poke the rat with a stick game. That’s a fun one.

But I love The Gate. I have still pop over there from time to time. I do like those little Park Slope moments. Like, you mention Dram Shop at one point and it’s fun. So, sorry. Go ahead.
So this guy starts flirting with me and I’m flirting back or maybe I started flirting with him. I don’t know what happened. I was in a dizzy space, but it was it was electrifying. If you’re in your 20s or if you’ve never been the mother of a three and a six year old, big deal. You go to a bar and flirt with you and it’s like. But I think women who have kids that age are so identifying with my story because they’re like, “Oh my God.” Just that freedom of feeling like you’re a sexy person, even if, you know, you weren’t dressing up or whatever, you’re like, “I still got it. Wow.” It was a real moment for me that I hadn’t expected. It was also something that my husband had expected because years prior, he had suggested that at some point I was going to want to sleep with someone outside of our marriage. I had very few partners before we met and he had quite a few. He’s only five years older, but had a four-and-a-half year boyfriend and I started late. So he always had said to me that my sleeping with someone else wasn’t a deal breaker, but lying about it was. And if I was going to sleep with someone he wanted to know about it. It also kind of turned him on. He also wanted to make sure I didn’t resent him. And so that’s how it began

Right. He encourages you to call this guy back, right. And go out with him.
We exchanged numbers and it went on from there.I was not even aspiring to be — I probably did know the word polyamorous — “ethical non-monogamy” was the mouthful that nobody was saying in 2008. But I did not want to fall in love with anybody. I thought that was very, very dangerous.That is really kind of the arc of “More,” is from 2008 to 2018, getting from the place of just kind of wanting to have a sexual free for all because I was so ready to escape my life to doing this in a much more thoughtful, intentional way that does now involve loving other people.

It’s a wild arc. Cause to your point, you and Stewart create a list of rules when you do decide, okay, I guess I’m going to go on this date and we’re going to open the marriage, which means he gets to go out.
Which was hard for me at first, but I always knew that was gonna be…

A little Trojan horse for him, you know.
Yeah, maybe, but how stupid would you have to be to think that… I mean, sometimes it does happen that way, but I know my husband too, so it wasn’t like it was a shock. I kind of was shocked because I didn’t want to think about it, but that’s one of the things that I’ve gotten a lot of pushback from on the book. I was “manipulated” into this. I would have had to been a pretty big idiot to not think it was possible.

I was going to get to that later because I’m wondering how he thinks about the portrayal throughout the book. It’s complicated at times. He’s encouraging. He can almost feel patronizing at times. Like he knows what’s best for you. He also uses your dating as his own little kink and turn on. It’s a complicated portrait and I don’t know if it always comes off as super-likable.
I think that’s that’s reality. I don’t encourage others to do what I’ve just done with talking about my husband. And to his credit though, he is really a good, not just a good sport, but wanted me to lean into the reality. And this is what I think is the only thing that makes a memoir or any story useful is if you’re willing to bear it all. Everybody has in their marriage – I know, because I talk to my friends and they tell me real things — everybody has stuff that’s complicated. Nobody’s their best self all the time. At this point though, and pretty soon into our journey, my husband and I, we can’t do, we don’t have any real secrets or hidden agendas any more. We know each other and ourselves better than we ever have at this point. For better or for worse, not everybody wants to have this level of communication, because it’s time consuming and it can be painful to know everything that your partner wants and thinks. But at the same time, it’s what really brought us closer to each other and we both feel more authentically ourselves than we ever thought we could.

That’s amazing. Back to the list, you got, you guys decide to open it up and you, you create this list of rules for how you’re going to navigate opening your marriage and all of which you ultimately break. No sleepovers, no dates more than once in the same week, no going to movies with your date and the big one, which you’ve already said you’ve broken — and maybe the hardest pill for a lot of people to swallow — is don’t fall in love. Of course if you’re routinely intimate with someone, you’re going to develop feelings for them, but how do you hold space for that when you’re married to someone else?
Well, I didn’t think it was possible. That’s why I had all the rules and all the other rules were just supposed to keep the intimacy from happening, the emotional intimacy. But I learned — not that quickly, that’s why it’s kind of a crazy ride — but I learned I needed more connection. And my husband ended up realizing he wanted more connection with other people than he had thought he wanted.

It’s funny how “don’t fall in love” turns out to be like a completely misguided or unrealistic goal. You sort of alluded to it a little bit, because towards the end of the book, I found myself wondering, “Why does she keep trying?” You seem so frequently kind of miserable after Matt, after Karl, fighting with Stuart about Kiwi, the seedy date with the giant schlong guy, Leo, Laurent. All of this kind of left you feeling kind of icky. Why did what like why did you keep bashing your head against the wall?
Thank you for asking that question because it’s a good question. And I think a lot of people wouldn’t have. And I think that is fair. And I did have moments where I was like, I can’t do this anymore. I can’t do this anymore. There are a couple of things. One of them is that I was in therapy and through my therapist, I was getting I was learning to get curious about myself and I was learning to see that what I said I wanted and what I really wanted didn’t always line up

Same.
And that there were right and that there were a lot of other feelings underneath my jealousy or my anger. And most of it was fear. And most of it was feeling like I wasn’t enough, fearing being alone, not really wanting to ever be alone with myself. There were a lot of things that I could have easily spent my life avoiding if I wanted to, but there was something else there. Another reason, a much more shallow reason, is there were some fun times in there as well. Just between you and me, I didn’t include every relationship I had in the book, because not all of them were that dramatic. All the ones that are there are true. But there were a couple of other ones that were just pure freaking fun that ended in heartbreak still when somebody moved away or, it wasn’t as, wasn’t as narratively enticing, but there were some of those relationships as well. And I think also the fact that I had my mother. I alluded before to the fact that my parents had an open marriage …

They didn’t call it that. They said, they had “affairs.”
They had affairs, but they knew about each other’s affairs and they talked about each other’s affairs and they knew about them before they happened. It’s not like that somebody got caught and confessed. It was almost the same thing where my father encouraged my mother. She did it first, then he did it later. And they both had more than one partner, some of whom I’ve met at this stage and, they’re still friends with them. So I had my mother telling me, “Oh sweetie. It’s gonna be fine.” Most mothers would be like, “What are you doing?” Most people would never talk to their mother about this. But my mother had been through it, was on the other side and she’s in a wheelchair now. She has Parkinson’s. My father is one of her main caregivers and she has no regrets. She feels like she had her cake and ate it too. She got to have all of this exploration and these relationships which have stayed important to her and never had to blow up her marriage because she loves my father, her husband. And so I had her on the other side telling me this was possible and showing me that it was possible.

That’s incredible.
And so it was kind of, you know, it’s like, I kind of want to see what’s here, you know.

We’re roughly the same age. I’m a year or two younger, but yeah, my parents are in that final chapter. My mom’s got dementia, but she definitely would have regrets if she could articulate them. And it’s a bummer to see that.
My mom got a, my mom was really afraid about the book coming out, but she got an email after the book came out from someone she’d gone to college with, a name I had never heard. They weren’t close, but this woman sent her an email saying, “You and your daughter are so brave. I don’t think I’ve ever done anything without worrying what other people would think.” I think that’s not atypical. This is the legacy I was talking about before. If you live that way, you die that way. And it’s a shame.

So speaking of your parents, do you think there’s a genetic component to this?
[Laughs.] My sister would say hell no. She’d just say we’re all freaking crazy. And so my kids would also say, I don’t know if I want to do that, but you know, life is long. You never know.

You still have partners, side pieces, whatever the lingo is.
I don’t really do the “side piece” thing anymore. I have two partners outside of my husband and we say things like “I love you” and we go out and we talk and we don’t have sex every time we see each other. It’s kinda like just more depth than that, but it’s where I’m at right now and it’s what I want.

And your husband is going to Costco with his girlfriend.
My favorite thing about her. Many lovely things about her, but the fact that she will help him shop appropriately is very, very nice.

So you broke all the rules. Are there rules that you still abide by? Is there a rule?
Just really just one, I think, which is that we try to hold space for each other’s feelings. And by that, I mean, because it really is me with him 99 percent of the time. When he does something or says something that I have feelings about, even if my feelings aren’t logical, I don’t know, something dumb where I’m like, “Ss she funnier than I am?” Whatever it is. If I start getting jealous, even if it’s crazy talk, even if it makes no sense, we have to take a moment and there’s something underneath it. Now we both know that that means I’m feeling a little insecure or I’m feeling a little unattended to, or maybe things aren’t going as well with one of my partners and I need to talk about it. Something else is going on. So now it’s like, okay, let’s talk about what else is going on. We might have a little fight, but our fights are so efficient now. We high five each other at the end of a fight practically. We’re like, “Damn, that used to take us six months. We just did that in like a tight five.” It’s so liberating. We know all the things that come up. There aren’t new things. They’re the same old things always. But they come up in a slightly new context, but now we recognize it.

It’s about recognizing patterns and you know, you’re in therapy a lot in this book. You’ve got your own therapist who and you’ve got your couples therapist. I love the Mitchell in the book. Again to the everything that everyone conundrum, there’s Straight A’s Molly, there’s Mercedes, your Ashley Madison profile, which I loved.
Well, that’s gotten me in trouble, but I tried to call myself out for the cultural appropriation in the book, but it’s still, it’s not, it’s not landing well. So it’s, it’s, I’m, I’m putting Mercedes Invierno to bed, but she did, she did thrive for a little while.

There’s MJ, there’s real Molly. And it speaks to the fractured self, I guess, that you’re living with.
That’s well said. New insight.

I mentioned Ashley Madison. At some point, probably after you were using it, there was a big scandal.
Oh, no. It was right in the middle of it.

It was a leak, right? Was your email address leaked?
Oh totally. I had a whole chapter about the Ashley Madison scandal that didn’t make it to the final book because it didn’t really affect me. Because my husband knew, but it affected at least one of my partners. But I felt like it wasn’t my story to tell, so I didn’t tell that one. There are certain stories that I didn’t include in the book because it would have just been like eating popcorn and watching. I have to keep this. arc about me. And the relationships that affected me and how I changed got to stay and the ones that just felt gratuitous, voyeuristic on my part, like, “ooh, let’s see what happens with this guy as his life blows up.” That’s not nice.

Well, I imagine that’s an impulse that a lot of people have when they pick up your book.
But it’s fair game, because I laid it out there. So other people’s stories I’m trying to only tell as much as impacted me, and I’m trying to hide details so that the innocent and not-so-innocent or protected.

There’s a moment in the book too where you’re dating this Karl character and it’s the first time that you realize that like you’re someone else’s secondary. “I’m someone else’s person who their husband or fiancé is dating.” What was that feeling?
It was complicated. I felt jealous, but I also felt like really respectful in some ways. I didn’t want to ruin their relationship. I won’t do any spoilers, but it got more complicated than that for other reasons. But I will brag: When I date now men in open marriages, the wives love me. The wives do love me because I’m like, I am not going to create drama. I’m going let them know when their wife has the right idea about something. I will send them home if the kid is sick. I will do any number of things that just show that I’ve got their back. And that’s something I’ve learned over time by my own experience of being the quote-unquote “primary.” Sometimes the primary is not very enticing. Being the primary means that you can also fall into the role of the nag. And so that’s something that my husband and I have had to work out too, where I’m like, “Wait a minute, you’re taking so and so for dinner. I want to go out to dinner.” It makes you reevaluate all the different aspects of a relationship though, so that you’re not just falling into the same patterns.

But to be clear, like you’re just dating individuals individually or there’s no group stuff happening. You’re not going on double dates or whatever. This is just like one-on-one stuff.
Yeah, and I want to say I feel very Seinfeldian, but not that there’s anything wrong with that. I know some lovely people who are very into group sex, but I’m not one of them. So what I have learned is that about myself is that I really do value the connection. Never say never. I never thought it was going to be possible to love two people at the same time, let alone three, which is my current. And the way I’m wired, it turns out once I love you, I kind of never stop. So I like love my exes. I still love Scott, the Scott character in the book. We talk every once in a while. We have dinner once in a while. But I don’t feel like I can connect the way I want to in group sex. It feels just a little too anonymous and too body-without-spirit kind of stuff for me. But, I know other people say, it doesn’t feel that way for me at all. And they feel like it’s a really beautiful experience. And some people just think, no, it’s just hot. You don’t want to like yuck anybody else’s yum by like, you know, dismissing other kink, but I don’t think it’s for me.

It all sounds so time consuming. It sounds like so much work. I mean, I guess the reward is there otherwise you wouldn’t still be doing it, but it just sounds like work so much.
It can feel like work. I think relationships are work. I think monogamy is work. Kids sure are work. Yet people don’t seem to think it’s a bad idea to have two or three kids.

Yes, you can love more than one person. You can love people in different ways. And when you have your second kid the worry is I’m not going to love this kid as much as I love my first one, but guess what? It’s not a finite commodity. You know, there’s plenty of it to go around.
But to your point, time is a finite resource. There are some people who prioritize their job and maybe work 80 hours a week. And to me, that would never appeal to me. And my husband used to work a lot more, let’s put it that way. So some people have said like, do you think he was cheating on you all along? And it makes me laugh because when I did tell him, “don’t tell me anything,” he’s just the worst liar. He just left a trail a mile long and a mile wide.

The hotel key in his pants.
All of it, all of it. I can tell when he’s not telling me the truth. No, I do not think that’s the case. But I do think that his work was a much bigger part of his life before and I think it’s healthier now. I think he’s a more balanced, happier person now that he’s given himself more space to do other things. And it’s not just other relationships. He’s like actually developed a hobby or two, which was not the case. He was really working all the time when our kids were little and he was building a business and supporting a family, which is not easy to do in Brooklyn. So, I respect all of that, but I think we assume that certain things are the right way to expend your energy and time and other things are the wrong way. I feel like I became a better mother when I started spending time away from my kids because it fed me.

Yeah, I get that.
I was a walking migraine for a few years though, and there, and that was not healthy for anybody. Back in that scene that you opened with about, you know, when my son at age 13 found out, his big question was, when do you do this? Because he felt like I was always around. I was like, yeah, I do other things. And then when I’m with them, I’m very present. I’m much more present than I had been prior. You see it all the time at the playground, parents just like texting on their phone and checking out because they’re done. They don’t have any time to just be. And I think it’s important to build time to be whatever it is you are outside of the role of mother in particular or there’s not gonna be much of a self to come back to when your kids leave, which they will, ideally.

There’s that moment in the book where your kids are finally old enough to not need a babysitter. I remember that. I was like, this is like game changer.
It’s a game changer. And for me too, when my youngest didn’t wake me up when he woke up, when like on a Saturday morning he would actually just like go turn on the TV or play by himself, I was like, “What is happening?” It’s like these moments happen and you’re like, I’m getting some time back. I’m getting some life back in my limbs. I can feel my fingers again. I know that I’m a person again.

The title is “More.” Why “More?”
My original title was “The Experiment.” And then it sounded too science-y because it really did feel like an experiment. And then it was “Open,” for obvious reasons, but then Rachel Krantz wrote a book called “Open.” And I was like, damn it. I can’t use that title. Andre Agassi wrote a book called “Open” too, but I thought maybe that would be my in for reaching out to him because I love him.

No meth confessions in your memoir, unlike his.
Was he on meth? How did I skip that part? Okay. I’m so naive. I probably was just like, “He didn’t mean it. That was a metaphor.” When I was told like, okay, it can’t be “Experiment.” it can’t be “Open.” I was like, “I don’t have a title.” I got the idea for the book during meditation, in fact. And the title came to me just as what my mother said to me, more than once in the book, which was, “Oh sweetie, don’t you worry. There will be more.” And when she said it to me the first time, I had just broken up with someone and she was like, “There will be more.” And I thought she just meant more men, more lovers. And perhaps that’s part of what she meant. But I also realized, there is so much more. Like you said, when you’re afraid, when you have your second child. “Will there be enough love?” Oh yeah, there will be more. And when you open yourself up to more, there will be more. And I was at my parents’ house when this meditation came to me, and I came downstairs to tell my parents, “My God, I just, I just figured out the title to the book. Mom, you’re gonna love this. It has to do with when you said there will be more to me.” And so I said, “I think it should just be ‘More.’” And my dad says, “I don’t know, Molly, it makes you sound like a harlot.” And I was like, what? And so then my mother goes, “Sweetie, he just means it makes you sound like a prostitute.” [Laughs.] But now they love the title. They’re like, “I get it now.” They hadn’t read the book when, but once they read it, they got the title and now they’re big fans.

Check out this episode of “Brooklyn Magazine: The Podcast” for more. Subscribe and listen wherever you get your podcasts.