All the best memoirs resemble novels. They progress along a powerful arc: An inciting incident is followed by rising action, leading to a climax when, at the peak of narrative tension, the characters confront and, by some means, resolve the central conflict.
Of course, there’s a delicious extra frisson to a memoir because the story is, purportedly, not simply some writer’s imaginings. It actually happened.
In 2006, during a memorable episode of her daily talk show, Oprah Winfrey took author James Frey to the televised equivalent of the woodshed. Winfrey, who had admired and championed Frey’s memoir of drug addiction, “A Million Little Pieces,” felt betrayed after the Smoking Gun website revealed Frey had included fictional elements in his book and had embellished real events. Winfrey branded Frey a liar, canceling him long before canceling became a thing. His publishers agreed to provide refunds to those who had purchased “A Million Little Pieces” assuming they were getting what was promised: a factual account of his life.
Belle Burden, the author of this year’s surprise hit “Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage,” is having a very different experience in the wake of a well-documented challenge to her veracity that the New Yorker published last month. The backlash has been minimal. People who might be expected to care — including Gwyneth Paltrow, who bought the movie rights, and Winfrey, who praised “Strangers” during Burden’s appearance on her podcast — apparently do not. Clearly, since Frey’s on-air shellacking, the burgeoning popularity of memoirs has been accompanied by a more relaxed attitude toward strict accuracy. But in Burden’s case, something else is at play, too: the natural sympathy she stirs as a woman whose husband abruptly left her after 20 years of marriage.
Not only do Burden’s legions of fans seem generally unconcerned that she may have prevaricated in “Strangers,” a number of readers and critics appear to resent that her story has been questioned at all. As Emily Gould of New York magazine wrote: “This kind of fact-checking is just one way of puncturing credibility, of finding a reason — and really any reason will do — why this particular woman doesn’t deserve to describe her own experience.”
When “Strangers” was published in January, it was an immediate bestseller. The book grew out of a viral Modern Love essay in the New York Times in which Burden documented, in 1,500 words, the painful breakdown of her marriage. Burden herself has a glamorous background. As the daughter of the late Carter Burden, New York politician and philanthropist, she is a member of the Vanderbilt family. Her mother, Amanda Burden, also came from wealth. Amanda’s mother was Babe Paley, a famous socialite who was one of Truman Capote’s “swans” and was married to Bill Paley, the businessman who built CBS into a media industry colossus.
In 1998, Belle Burden was working at a New York corporate law firm when she met and fell in love with a colleague, Henry Davis (called James in the memoir). After a short courtship, the two decided to marry, and, as Burden recounted later, Davis, who enjoyed none of Burden’s generational wealth, pressed for an amendment to their prenuptial agreement. He desired that what each spouse earned during the marriage would remain his or her property in the event of a divorce; only those assets held in both names would be considered joint property and divided. Against her lawyer’s advice, Burden signed this amended agreement.
Nearly 20 years passed. The marriage produced three children. Burden gave up her work as an attorney to be a stay-at-home mother. Davis joined a hedge fund and gradually climbed the ranks. Meanwhile, using the money from two multimillion-dollar trust funds established for Burden by her father and grandparents, the couple bought two valuable pieces of real estate: a large apartment in Manhattan’s Tribeca neighborhood and a vacation home on Martha’s Vineyard.
The inciting incident for the memoir takes place in March 2020 during the pandemic. The family is quarantining on Martha’s Vineyard when Burden receives a phone call from a man claiming his wife is having an affair with Davis. When confronted, Davis admits the affair, and some regret, before the next morning announcing he has been unhappy for a long time and wants a divorce.
Blindsided, Burden begs for an explanation, but, in her telling, Davis could not — or would not — provide one. He declares that the children, then aged 12, 15 and 18, should live with Burden but that he intends to retain his half-ownership stake in the apartment and the Vineyard house, as he is entitled to under the prenup. Tensions rise. Most of the book describes Burden reexamining her marriage, looking for red flags. She realizes she was foolish, not only to ignore her lawyer’s advice but also to have subsequently kept herself in the dark about their finances.
Davis, it emerges, has squirreled away a fortune in cash since the wedding, and having recently been made a partner in his firm, will now rake in seven figures annually in salary and bonuses, none of which Burden will share in. She despairs, also, that her children will suffer the loss of their homes just as their father is leaving the family because, she claims, she cannot afford to buy out her soon-to-be ex.
At the last minute, the hour before the divorce trial was to begin, Burden writes, Davis relented, and the houses became her sole property. This makes for a dramatic denouement, and the reader sighs with relief that Burden will not, on top of everything else, lose her cherished safe havens.
In her New Yorker article, journalist Jessica Winter — who had access to confidential court documents, including the original prenuptial agreement — lays out how Burden’s financial security was never at risk. Her wealth totals over $60 million, and although about two-thirds of this is locked up in a trust that she currently cannot touch, she has access to several million dollars, Winter reports. And in the year before the divorce, she earned $800,000, thanks to her interest in family holdings. Also, Davis’s concession came not before a trial but in advance of a status conference, a very preliminary stage of a divorce proceeding.
It bears noting, too, that in the Modern Love piece, Burden said nothing about money, instead focusing on her overwhelming sense of dislocation after her husband’s departure: Had she ever really known him at all? In expanding her essay into a book-length manuscript, Burden clearly followed standard editorial advice to make her story broadly appealing. Not only did she need “Strangers” to have propulsive, page-turning momentum, but she also needed to come across as relatable.
It’s a testament to her skill as a writer, and the keen commercial instincts of her editors, that “Strangers” delivers on both imperatives, although at the expense of the full truth of Burden’s rarefied circumstances. Promoting the book, Burden has welcomed suggestions that it’s a cautionary tale, a spur for married women to insist on financial transparency in their marriages.
In a statement to the New Yorker, Burden said she stands by everything she wrote in the book: “I shared my heartache, my mistakes, and my shame. I owned my privilege as plainly as I could.”
What she doesn’t say, either in the statement or overtly in “Strangers,” is how her story throbs with a pain as old as time — a rich woman’s fear that she is loved only for her money. Davis, Burden describes in the memoir, first expressed romantic interest in her upon discovering who her parents were. Once they married, her wealth paid for a life he could not afford alone — a life, she claims, he felt he had been unjustly denied as a child because of his own father’s breakdown and failure to afterwards work. And Davis remained married to Burden until the year he made partner at his hedge fund, at which point he could bankroll his own uber-affluent lifestyle.
Burden may have been urged to embrace an everywoman’s narrative — I’m just like you but with a bigger bank balance — yet in the end that’s not why her book works. Her willingness to lay bare her shame and sorrow at being abandoned resonates with a large audience of women primed to hear what she’s so eloquently expressing. Some because they have married their far smaller fortunes to dastardly men, but many others because they suspect that their myriad expenditures for their partners in terms of time, love and support will never be fully recognized or reciprocated. They feel foolish, and they feel angry, and they wish they weren’t so vulnerable to being played.
In “Strangers” the facts may not totally line up, but the emotions are all present and accounted for.
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