Two new memoirs about polyamory and divorce

DO ALL MEMOIRISTS live in Brooklyn? Perhaps no place is denser with the desire for self-examination—or self-exoneration. Two riveting new memoirs about monogamy and its discontents hail from this borough. The authors seem to be asking the same plaintive question: is this what progress looks like for women?

Molly Roden Winter has called her memoir about her open marriage “More”, which feels apt. Her chronicle certainly includes more lovers, but also more bad dates, more anxious texts and more ways to screw up the children. Ms Winter has described her book as a warts-and-all account of the increasingly popular and potentially rewarding lifestyle of polyamory. For readers who are curious, expect anecdotes that make a strong case for being one and done.

Ms Winter’s husband, Stewart, has admitted in interviews that he is nervous about how this book makes him look. He is right to worry. Ms Winter’s extramarital dalliances began after he encouraged her to pursue them, “as long as you tell me everything”. At first she revels in the thrill of feeling “not like a wife or a mom but a desirable woman again”, but she finds much of the sex degrading and struggles with sharing her husband. She pleads for them to close up their marriage. Stewart is loving but firm: “You have to give it time.”

Once a top student, Ms Winter throws herself into this new lifestyle like someone studying for a test. She has sex with non-monogamous men, one of whom takes her to an inn where the furniture is covered in “easy-to-wipe plastic”. But she senses she is still trying to be the good girl, the accommodating girl, who gives more than she gets. “I thought freedom was supposed to be fun,” Ms Winter vents to her shrink.

It takes the length of the book for Ms Winter to find an extramarital relationship that feels worthwhile, but the journey is too long and fraught for this payoff to be convincing (not least because this lover is too needy to accept the limited commitment she can give). Ms Winter insists her understanding of herself is now deeper, her marriage richer, but after she has spent around 80% of her memoir weeping over the emotional challenges of polyamory, this resolution feels forced. As for all the scheduling, emotional ministering and negotiating of boundaries, you cannot help but wonder: who has time for that?

Where Ms Winter’s book seeks excitement in marriage by transgressing its borders, Leslie Jamison’s “Splinters” opens with a divorce. The memoir starts in the office of a divorce lawyer, where a five-minute cry wastes $50 in hourly fees. After years of couples’ counselling, Ms Jamison had hoped a baby would help her relationship. Instead, the arrival of a daughter clarified “that this home was not the home I wanted her to know.” Ms Jamison’s marriage had lasted 13 months—the same age as the baby she and her ex will raise separately but together.

A prolific 40-year-old memoirist, Ms Jamison has already chronicled her alcoholism and her anorexia, among other trials. Her talents as a writer allow these exercises in self-exposure to transcend self-indulgence, but she is wise about her impulse to transform the muck of life into artful prose. Ambition, she admits, has always felt more tangible and more accessible than contentment.

“Get specific,” Ms Jamison tells her writing students at Columbia University. Her own work is vivid with detail, and she is thoughtful on motherhood, which both undercuts and enhances her sense of self. She signs books while her breasts leak milk, weeps over baggies of goldfish crackers and feels greedy for—and guilty over—whatever time she steals for herself. She wonders if her performance of maternal selflessness is in fact a performance. She recalls wearing a baby carrier as she tells her students how motherhood is sharpening her gaze, when a student interrupts: “Leslie…I think your daughter might be choking on a grape?”

Both books consider the flipside of privilege: the restlessness that accompanies freedom, the discontentment that comes when chasing happiness. These women are writing about lives filled with unprecedented choices regarding whom and how to love and when or whether to become a mother. But they are also limning the limits of these liberties, particularly in lives hemmed in by the demands of motherhood and the desire to be desired by men. Ms Jamison admits that her unwieldy life is not exactly what she had hoped for herself, but “I’d been part of every choice that made” it, she writes. It is a revelation that does not seem to comfort her. ■