Author Jenny Block to Read at the Center

Open

Love, Sex, and Life in an Open Marriage

By Jenny Block

About the Book

Finally, a book about open marriage that grapples with the problems surrounding monogamy and fidelity in an honest, heartfelt, and non-fringe manner.

Jenny Block is your average girl next door, a suburban wife and mother for whom married life never felt quite right. While many books on this topic presuppose that the reader is ready to embrace an "alternative lifestyle," Block operates from the assumption that most couples who are curious about or engaged in open marriages are in fact more like her -- normal people who question whether monogamy is right for them; good people who love their spouses but want variation; capable parents who are not deviant just because they choose to be honest about their desires.

In Open, Block paints a down-to-earth picture of how an open marriage can work, and specifically why it works for her and her husband. In dissecting other people's strong reactions to her choice, she explores the question of why cheating is more socially acceptable than open marriage. In part, she concludes, the lack of models for successful functional open marriages is such that the general public is not yet equipped to handle treating it as anything other than abnormal.

Open challenges our notions of what traditional marriage looks like, and presents one woman's journey down an uncertain path that ultimately proves that open marriage is a viable option, and one that's in fact better for some couples than conventional marriage.

Reviews

Fresh, insightful, and full of brave honesty, Open is an important contribution to the discussion of love, marriage, and the future.     -- Rebecca Walker, author of Baby Love: Choosing Motherhood After a Lifetime of Ambivalence

Block skillfully blends her story with research on sexuality, monogamy, adultery, and divorce (sources wisely appended). She makes compelling arguments against the biology of monogamy...This honest and compelling memoir should spark a respectful dialogue about the underground status of open marriages. Some readers will feel relief, many will be aroused or curious, and others will definitely be insulted...This is brave, brave stuff, colleagues. Buy it. Read it. Love it, if you can. --Library Journal

She writes movingly of how her perfect marriage unraveled...Block is unstintingly honest in her depictions of an open marriage's sexual and emotional entanglements...Readers are likely to be challenged and provoked  by this book's insights into the surprising fluidities in fidelity and sexuality. --Publishers Weekly

About Jenny Block

Jenny Block writes for HuffingtonPost.com,The Dallas Morning News, BeE, People Newspapers, Stone, and D. She also has work in the books It's a Girl: Women Writers on Raising Daughters (Seal Press, 2006) and Letters to my Teacher. In addition, her writing has appeared in American Way, www.ellegirl.com, bRILLIANT, Where, Chow.com, Pointe, Virginia Living, Style Weekly, Tango, Richmond Magazine, and Literary Mama.com. The inspiration for Open stems from the "Portrait of an Open Marriage," which ran in Tango and was reprinted by Cosmopolitan Germany and The Huffington Post.

Jenny holds both her Bachelor's and her Master's in English from Virginia Commonwealth University, where she taught composition for nearly ten years. She has also taught at the University of Richmond and Strayer University, as well as lectured at academic conferences across the country. Jenny has written numerous academic ancillaries for the Newsweek Education Program, Addison Wesley Longman, and Simon and Schuster.