Wide Open , livre ebook

“Vulnerable and vivacious, Wide Open is a deeply personal, beautifully written tale of one woman’s erotic journey to find herself and keep her family together. Gracie X bares her soul in this gripping memoir filled with pain and pleasure, growth, endings, and new beginnings. I couldn’t put it down!”
— Elisabeth Sheff , author of The Polyamorists Next Door: Inside Multiple-Partner Relationships and Families (2014), and editor of Stories from the Polycule: Real Life in Polyamorous Families (2015)
“Gracie X has written an honest and engaging memoir about taking one of the biggest risks of her life—opening up her marriage despite warnings from friends and loved ones to not ‘rock the boat’ and her own fears. While honoring both her deep commitment to her husband and children and her reawakened sexuality, she shows us that, yes, we are capable of loving many people and receiving love back, as well as creating a marriage that is unique to our needs—a valuable lesson for all of us, whether polyamorous, monogamous, or monogamish.”
— Vicki Larson , award-winning journalist and coauthor of The New I Do: Reshaping Marriage for Skeptics, Realists and Rebels
“For anyone who’s curious about how to approach polyamory or open relationships with your partner, Wide Open is a must-read. Gracie X graciously lays out her complicated journey in a funny, honest, and relatable way that will inspire others to follow their heart. Redefining the family and relationship model is not an easy task; however, Wide Open gives you hope that through honest communication, emotional maturity, and patience, anything is possible.”
— Natalia Garcia , director and creator of Showtime’s Polyamory: Married & Dating
“I was moved by Gracie X as she shared a tender, passionate, and vulnerable memoir that inspires as it warns. This book is a must-read, authentic addition to the literature on open relationships and polyamory. As an intimacy counselor, I recommend her book for those who wish to experience the real-life joys, sorrows, challenges, and gifts of alternative relationship.”
— Francesca Gentille , contributing author of The Marriage of Sex and Spirit , radio host of “Sex: Tantra and Kama Sutra,” and relationship and intimacy counselor
“This is a remarkable book. At a time when liberals and conservatives alike are embracing marriage and the nuclear family, Gracie X sends us a life raft—the bold chronicle of her quest to create a family configuration that works for her, her husband, new lover, and children. Gracie X is not only creative and brave—she is also a consummate storyteller. Be prepared for a riveting tale of her journey into intense new love while her marriage simultaneously evolves and realigns itself. For anyone weary from the dry, didactic tone of poly how-to books, this memoir provides a wealth of information about the triumphs and tribulations of exploring polyamory. And it is an indispensable resource for those seeking to forge a new way with their partners and families, expanding the bounds of even polyamory itself.”
—Ann E. Tweedy , poet and author of Beleaguered Oases (CreativePress 2010) and White Out (Green Fuse Poetic Arts 2013)
“To open her kimono and share how one woman and two families made sense of the paradox that is love, sex, family, intimacy, and honesty in our modern lives, is an act of tremendous courage and generosity. Her sassy, relatable, sexy truth-telling burns away the tarnish that convention can leave on our hearts. Even if our journeys look different than Gracie X’s (as indeed they should), let us stand up and shout out: Viva the moxie of Gracie X to open her heart and her mouth. Say it, sister!”
—LiYana Silver , mentor for Women’s Embodiment: Bringing Your Feminine Genius to Life ( http://liyanasilver.com )
Publisher’s Note
Wide Open is a memoir that describes the life experiences of the author, who writes under the pseudonym Gracie X (and is sometimes identified as Grace in the text).
Real names are used in the Acknowledgments except for the individuals called “Hank,” “Valerie,” and “Oz,” which are fictitious names.
All personal names in the Dedication and the main text are fictitious with the exception of Judy Jones (who is identified by her real first name in the main text), and the individual identified as Deb, who is also called by the nicknames Gentle Bear and Bear. All business names associated with the individual called “Susan” are fictitious. Berkeley, the setting where much of the story takes place, is used fictitiously in place of the actual setting.
For these reasons, any similarities between the fictitious names used in this book, as described above, and any real people and places are strictly coincidental.

Distributed in Canada by Raincoast Books

Copyright © 2015 by Gracie X New Harbinger Publications, Inc. 5674 Shattuck Avenue Oakland, CA 94609 www.newharbinger.com

Cover design by Amy Shoup; Acquired by Catharine Meyers;
Edited by Marisa Solís

All Rights Reserved

_____________
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
X, Gracie.
Wide open : my adventures in polyamory, open marriage, and loving on my own terms/ Gracie X ; foreword by Carol Queen.
pages cm
ISBN 978-1-62625-058-1 (paperback) -- ISBN 978-1-62625-059-8 (pdf-ebook) -- ISBN 978-1-62625-060-4 (epub) 1. X, Gracie. 2. Open marriage--United States. 3. Sexual freedom--United States. 4. Families--United States. I. Title.
HQ980.5.U5X22 2015
306.84--dc23
2015010145

I wish to dedicate this book to
the warriors in service of love,
those who dare to love uniquely,
in their own way
with whomever they choose,
I toast you,
for the heart may be a lonely hunter
but she is also persistent and unrelenting
and there is no greater engine
than the calling song of the desirous heart.
To my children,
may you be warriors in the service of love,
seeking then finding all you need.
To Hank, for the perfect DNA and the great love.
To Valerie, for the willingness to go off road.
And forever to my beloved Oz,
you are my muse, my love, you are my muse…
Foreword
Carol Queen, PhD
Marriage is certainly in a state of flux nowadays. Some want in, some want out, and some want over the top, as though marriage was a wall you could scale to find a different garden on the other side. It speaks volumes, perhaps, that I—a conscientious marriage objector, listed on the Alternatives to Marriage website right there next to Beauvoir and Sartre, as well as an occasional officiant for marriage-minded couples who seek me out—should be tapped to write the introductory words for a book that is so much about marriage and its meaning. In the days of Old Marriage, I would not have been that guy.
But I work very close to the epicenter of what some call Modern Love. Yes, it was a terrific Bowie song, but now it’s so much more: It’s a movement of open-relationship believers, activists, and theorists, an army of lovers who refuse to believe that life’s possibilities close off when they say “I do”—or who decide never to use those words at all, preferring, like Molly Bloom, to say. “Yes, yes, yes.”
This movement goes by many names: polyamory or polyfidelity, open marriage or open relationship, Marriage 2.0. On one side of its vast net of life possibilities is a playful erotic culture; on another, a resurgent community (something like the communes and village life of yore) within which people raise their children in a nonnuclear fashion, thoroughly modern yet with roots that sink deeply into a way of life many of us postwar and new-century babies never knew till we re-created it. Some participants are creating family of choice because they can, and others because they must: LGBTQ partnerships are only at this very moment beginning to emerge from a world of alternative relationships, because “alternative” was the only possible flavor those relationships have been able to have.
Really, this movement consists of everyone but the players, the naysayers to love, and the married monogamists, for everyone in between those extremes of relationality has two things in common, however uncommonly they may express them: They are open to love and ongoing partnering of some sort, and they are open to having more than one such connection simultaneously.
Most of us (except maybe these peoples’ kids) were raised in a zero-sum game as surely as the Cold War politics into which I fledged. You either were committed, or you weren’t. You were true, or you were faithless. I was one of those people who wanted more than one person in my erotic and emotional world—maybe not both at once (though I’ve lived that way and valued it deeply), but at least potentially; I like triangles better than dyads, and always have. Maybe this is because I’ve acknowledged my own bisexuality since I was a teenager (though in a world of gender variation, that word seems more binary today than many of us find relevant, given our lived experience with more than just men and women ); because I’ve always valued sexual curiosity and been certain I’d learn more from many than I did from one; or maybe it’s because I watched my mother, trapped in a monogamous and gender-role-restrictive marriage, wither, starved of life’s possibility. When I understood that this orientation on my part meant I’d be called a slut, I saw that word was meant to restrict me from experience I thought I had a right to explore—so it never really stung. If anything, it showed I’d already scaled the fence.
Being queer helped; it meant I was out of the box, maybe out of several boxes. Reading helped: I saw that historical moments that used to be called bohemian generally included a lot of relationship re-creation and experimentation, whether it centered around Frida and Diego or Natalie Barney and her many lovers, Bloomsbury or communes in the 1960s, the Beats or buffet flats, Paris before the war or the precious pre-AIDS renaissance of gay freedom. I learned that this way of loving had a history.
But