Books

Poly Books

Guides

The Ethical Slut: A Practical Guide to Polyamory, Open Relationships & Other Adventures by Dossie Easton, Janet W. Hardy

The word “slut” is thrown around so much, it’s meanings have become seemingly endless. This book twists the standardized definition and reassures you that seeking intimacy outside of your marriage doesn’t make you something worthy of derogatory terms. In this novel the authors breakdown the myths about sluthood and show you how to maintain a successful polyamorous lifestyle through open communication, emotional honesty, and safer-sex practices.

The Polyamorists Next Door: Inside Multiple-Partner Relationships and Families
by Elisabeth Sheff

Many married couples flirting with the idea of opening their marriage worry first and foremost about their children. The landscape of the American marriage is changing and monogamy is no longer the only option. This book touches on “the family system” where children are aware of their parents’ arrangements. Some even having their parents’ partners living in the household. In detail, explore how polyamorous relationships come to be, grow and change, plus manage the ins and outs of daily family life.

Opening Up: A Guide To Creating and Sustaining Open Relationships
by Tristan Taormino

Relationship expert and bestselling author Tristan Taormino offers a bold new strategy for creating loving, lasting relationships. Drawing on in-depth interviews with over a hundred women and men, Opening Up explores the real-life benefits and challenges of all styles of open relationships — from partnered non-monogamy to solo polyamory. With her refreshingly down-to-earth style and sharp wit, Taormino offers solutions for making an open relationship work, including tips on dealing with jealousy, negotiating boundaries, finding community, parenting and time management. Opening Up will change the way you think about intimacy.

More Than Two: A Practical Guide to Ethical Polyamory by Franklin Veaux, Eve Rickert, Tatiana Gill (Illustrator)

If you are considering an open relationship, or choosing to be polyamorous long-term, this has been called a beginner’s guide.
[Before choosing this book read this.]

Related Books, Essays and Conversations

Love Without Sex, by Sophie Lucido Johnson

This awesome Audible Original explores the relationship of love and sex by looking at folks in both the polyamory (many+love) community and the asexual community and exploring the Venn Diagram of where those circles intersect. This raises lovely questions about love, sex, platonic relationships and friendships and the assumptions we make and how we experience and value all these beautiful human experiences. I highly recommend this!

Contemporary Literature: Memoirs and Fiction in a Contemporary Setting

Wide Open, by Gracie X
Published by New Harbinger Publications, ISBN: 9781626250581

I think Gracie's memoir can be compared to The Price of Salt, the book that inspired the movie Carol. The plot of Wide Open is similar in some respects to the plot of Carol, but in a more contemporary setting. If you look over time at the arc of change from the 1950s (when The Price of Salt was written) to now, our culture has been through a change from rigidity and non-acceptance to more flexibility, more tolerance and greater acceptance. I think that's a good thing. But, we have a long way to go. (My Review)

Love You Two, by Maria Pallotta-Chiarolli
Random House Australia, ISBN: 9781742746098

Linda on Goodreads said: I really loved reading this book, and was inspired to find a book that didn't discuss polyamory only in terms of sex or in a bad light. This was a really wonderful book about a "normal" family like any one of ours that has secrets and how those secrets impact those involved. It is also about family dynamics and the pressure put on the young by their ancestors, they have to live up to all of those expectations. Those expectations can be a main cause of the unhappiness in the first place.

Many Love: A Memoir of Polyamory and Finding Love(s), by Sophie Lucido Johnson
Simon & Schuster, ISBN: 978-1-5011-8978-4

What I love most about this book is Sophie Lucido Johnson's holistic approach to polyamory. What she offers is not just polyamory as a way to structure relationships, or even polyamory as a relationship orientation. Her book (to me) offers polyamory as a way of being, living and loving. Her book's holistic approach expands the concept of "many love" to encompass the loving intimate space we call friendship, and the loving intimate space we call romance and also the loving intimate space in between. (My Review)