It is often the case that (to slightly amend a line from Joan Didion) we tell ourselves stories in order to love, crafting our own tidy narrative while papering over the danger signs and hidden trip wires that can untangle a relationship. Love is irrational and stands apart from reason, which might account for the nearly 40% divorce rate in this country; we often recognize the hairline cracks when it’s too late, when faith has dissolved and the hard truth is revealed.
Such was the case with Belle Burden. She was a child of privilege, the daughter of Carter Burden, a Vanderbilt descendant and media executive, and Amanda Burden, the daughter of Babe Paley and an influential urban planner. An aspiring writer as a teenager, Burden turned her focus to law in college, earning a degree in Juvenile and Immigration Law from New York University. She was, in short, a golden child from a prominent family, bound for success.
But then love and marriage reared its head and Burden’s story took a dark turn, which she chronicles with a keen forensic eye in her buzzy new memoir, “Strangers.” An instant bestseller, “Strangers”has struck a chord with readers, married and divorced alike, who recognize the danger signs in Burden’s love story. The memoir continues to sell vigorously months after its initial release, her face has graced the cover of a national magazine, Burden has appeared on a spate of TV talk shows, including “Good Morning America,” and the book has started a national conversation about marriage and infidelity. Recently, Gwyneth Paltrow signed on to produce and star in the film adaption of “Strangers” for Netflix, after a massive bidding war.
“It’s been astounding,” says Burden of the book’s sudden success. “I thought it would be a quiet book, passed around among friends, and that was enough for me.” She adds it has a life of its own now, especially for those facing marital strife.
Burden’s marriage ended like a tawdry melodrama. A phone call from a stranger, telling Burden that his wife was having an affair with her husband. Then, the dissembling from Burden’s husband, the declarations that it meant nothing, that he still loved her. And then, like a bolt from the blue, Burden’s husband asking for a divorce the following day, before leaving the house for good to check on his lover, who had swallowed a bottle of pills. All of this transpired during COVID lockdown. They had been married for over 20 years.
“We’re stuck in this house with kids on an island, and we decide we will do therapy on Zoom,” says Burden. “And then it all changed from midnight to 6 a.m., when he told me it was completely done. It all felt completely crazy, and for all of this to happen during lockdown … it was the worst possible thing that could have happened.”
The marriage began like a dream. Burden met her future husband James (no surname is provided in the book) at a time when she was surviving on raw nerves, reeling from the sudden death of her father a few years prior and trying to advance her career at a prominent New York law firm. James was Burden’s colleague, a senior associate who at the time was handling, with Burden’s help, the IPO for an internet holding company. James was whip-smart, meticulous in manner and dress, effortlessly charming. Their work partnership soon bloomed into an illicit romance. That summer, writes Burden, was “a blur of weekends in his bed and mine, clandestine encounters behind locked doors at the office, backgammon and gimlets” in James’ loft.
They were engaged shortly thereafter, followed by an intimate wedding at her mother’s estate in Southampton. In addition to the wedding certificate, James signed a prenuptial agreement that Burden’s mother insisted upon. When the newlyweds found an apartment in downtown Manhattan, Burden used the proceeds of a family trust to buy it, with James as a joint owner.
Cue the reality TV cliches about blind love, about marriage as a leap of faith. Perhaps a more apt quote comes from T.S Eliot: In my beginning is my end. “The speed of our beginning and the speed of our ending, of his exit, felt like matching bookends,” Burden writes. “They both left me reeling… The Switch went on, and then it went off. He wanted it, he wanted me. And then he didn’t”
Burden wrote this long after the fact, when the binary nature of her marriage became self-evident. But while she was in it, it was more like the proverbial frog in the pot of water: content as the heat is ever so slowly raised, then helpless when it becomes too late to jump out. As her husband’s career advanced, he spent more time in Manhattan while Burden tended to the family in their house in Martha’s Vineyard. Burden’s marriage began to settle into the traditional gender roles of homemaker and breadwinner, despite the fact that it was Burden who had financed their lifestyle.
“I saw him as the caretaker and it was sort of this romantic thing,” says Burden. “And the more this went on, the more I convinced myself that I couldn’t understand the finances, which is absurd, as I’m a corporate lawyer. Everything became about his work and his career advancement, and that happens so often with men, where the men’s career becomes the most important thing in a family. And it becomes a lot easier to lose track of your own talents and passions.”
Burden’s family legacy was fractured by infidelity and a laissez faire attitude, at least in the public sphere, toward men behaving badly. “My childhood was defined by two divorces,” says Burden. “My mother and father divorced when I was 2, and my mother and stepfather divorced when I was 12. It wasn’t an unhappy childhood, I was privileged, in good health, and well educated. But it was lonely.” Burden’s grandmother Babe Paley, a prominent New York socialite, was married to William Paley, the founder of CBS and a serial philanderer. For the sake of propriety — Paley was one of the 20th century’s most powerful media paschas — his indiscretions were kept quiet.
Burden internalized this pattern, of foregrounding the importance of the paterfamilias at the expense of real intimacy, of keeping up appearances despite the private pain. “I felt, in my bones … a value in not calling [men] out, in protecting a man’s belief in his own importance,” writes Burden.
After the breakup of their marriage, Burden’s husband flipped from provider to usurper. He gave up custody of their three children and threatened to cut all financial assistance. He also came after all of their joint property, which Burden had purchased with her family trusts. While all of this was playing out, Burden was isolated, unable to access her support system during lockdown. “No one could get to me, I was on an island and I didn’t know anyone,” she says. “But the flip side of that was being able to sort of hide out, and not show my face. I would just go on these long walks, weeping.”
The legal maneuvering continued for months, right up until an hour before they were set to enter a courtroom, at which point James relented. The properties would remain Belle’s. Her children would be taken care of financially. There would be no bloody court fight for assets. But he would keep all the money he earned during their marriage.
“The responsibility I take in all of this is accepting distance,” says Burden. “He did exist at a remove from me and the kids, and I didn’t push him, or ever really discuss our relationship. But he kept saying he was happy. If you don’t tell someone ‘I’m miserable, and I hate this and that about you,’ if you’re not communicating, it’s hard to know what’s going on. As far as red flags are concerned, it may sound ridiculous, but I didn’t see any.”
Burden has been surprised by the overwhelming resonance of her book, and the universality of the emotional and psychological pain she endured in her marriage. Her memoir, which was based in part on Burden’s popular New York Times Modern Love essay “Was I Married to a Stranger?”, has become a rallying point for those who might not otherwise have been able to articulate just how traumatic a sudden and unexpected swerve into divorce can be.
“It’s almost like it has a life of its own now, beating its own path,” says Burden. “I hear from so many readers every day, all seeing some part of themselves in my book. The outward facing part of it — speaking publicly, being interviewed — has been a growth experience, to say the least. It takes a lot out of me; I have to get in bed after some of these things. But I feel connected to humanity in a way I never have before, and that is a beautiful thing.”
Weingarten is the author of “Thirsty: William Mulholland, California Water, and the Real Chinatown.”
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