The misery memoir of a devoted polyamorist

The rules of sex can kill. In 1844 an angry mob shot Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism, for his polygamous ways. But in the counterculture today, polyamorists face less of a physical threat and more of a metaphysical one, as chronicled by the journalist Rachel Krantz in her tortured book Open: An Uncensored Memoir of Love, Liberation and Non-Monogamy.

At its heart it’s the dark tale of a vulnerable woman falling for a manipulative man who slowly sucks the soul and marrow out of her. I wondered: why write this book, Rachel? You’re on the path to healing, so why peel your skin off with your nib and present it to the reader? Krantz offers her own diagnosis: ‘Dating Adam elicited masochistic tendencies’; she assuaged his desires by becoming polyamorous in the first place. Perversely, despite a whole book detailing how miserable she was, Krantz continues to toot the trumpet for polyamory, blaming her relationship rather than the idea.

The pain she endures and her dedication to the ‘unfiltered’ make Open the perfect title. Krantz seems to have neither emotional nor sexual boundaries; nor, for that matter, linguistic ones. She identifies at one point what she calls her ‘high stream of consciousness’, and curious similes abound: ‘I nodded appreciatively, like he was some sort of hot Mother Teresa’; ‘When he smiled, the crinkles drew his face up like the curtain before a symphony.’ The book is a generic pick’n’mix of pop psychoanalysis, cultural criticism and the kind of diary entries a teenage girl writes on tear-stained pages. Krantz throws in allusions to academic works such as Sex at Dawn (a revisionist account of the evolutionary origins of human sexual behaviour); but other intellectual references include a feminist analysis of the Little Mermaid that she produced while high on magic mushrooms.