REVIEWS

Review of Double Happiness at Books & Publishing
‘Double Happiness would make an excellent choice for book clubs; it is a refreshing novel that will appeal to those interested in modern philosophy, sociology, love and relationships. A must-read for fans of Alain de Botton’s The Course of Love and Dolly Alderton’s Everything I Know About Love.’

INTERVIEWS

Interview with Rochelle Siemienowicz by Nadia Heisler at Books & Publishing
“I’ve always been fascinated by the mutability of love and relationships, how they change over time—usually at odds with our deepest wishes and commitments. When we say ‘I do’ in our marriage vows—or promise ‘forsaking all others’ in partnership until ‘death do us part’—most of us are entirely sincere. Yet we fail, over and over. I wrote about this in my memoir, Fallen, where I had to confront a loss of Christian religious faith as well as the loss of a ‘happily ever after’ marriage. With Double Happiness, I explore these themes in a new way, where partnerships are forced to evolve or die, but love and commitment can endure, albeit in new formations.”

Why write autofiction? A guest post by Rochelle Siemienowicz on The Writer Laid Bare
‘Double Happiness is necessarily a story with many graphic sex scenes. There are couples, throuples, foursomes and moresomes. And if I were the reader of such a book, I’d definitely also wonder how much of it was ‘true’.

But my story is crafted as fiction and told from three perspectives. This was the only way I could find through a maze of narrative possibilities and failed experiments with voice – including trying a traditional first-person memoir at one stage. It wasn’t prudery or shame that made me turn to fiction either, it was the fact that my memoiristic voice was insufferably self-mythologising and necessarily limited. I couldn’t ‘hear’ the multifaceted, multi-voiced truth of what I knew about ‘poly’. A memoir wouldn’t give the freedom to say what I wanted to say about love and its many shapeshifting, contradictory forms in long term relationships.’

PODCASTS

Podcast: What Artists Eat
‘If writer Rochelle Siemienowicz were a dish, she’d be part writer, truth-teller, lover, mother, community builder and tarot reader with a dash of perhaps too much red lipstick.’

Rochelle talks about food, art and the challenges of the creative life with What Artists Eat hosts, Claire Lefebvre and Zoltan Fecsu.

Podcast: Sex, Love and Science with Lauren Muratore: Kitchen Table Polyamory
Rochelle Siemienowicz and Markus Stone discuss their journey to kitchen table polyamory with sexologist Lauren Muratore. They talk about jealousy in a relationship, how to work with it, and how it can enhance eroticism.