What’s Missing from Belle Burden’s “Strangers”
Belle Burden’s “Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage” is the runaway publishing phenomenon of the year. In January, it débuted at No. 1 on the Times hardcover nonfiction list. Four months after its publication, the book, in its ninth printing, still hovers near the top of the rankings. On NPR’s “All Things Considered,” the co-host Juana Summers summed up the popularity of “Strangers” by asking, “Have you ever had that experience, no matter who you talk to—your mom, your friend, your co-worker—they’re all telling you, ‘You’ve just got to read this book’?” Burden has sat for interviews on “Good Morning America,” and with Oprah Winfrey, Billy Bush, and Drew Barrymore. After a bidding war for the film rights, Gwyneth Paltrow is reportedly set to star in and executive-produce an adaptation for Netflix, with a screenplay by the acclaimed playwright Heidi Schreck.
The opening chapter of “Strangers,” which is expanded from a viral essay that Burden published in the Times’ “Modern Love” section, is fittingly cinematic. One evening early in the coronavirus pandemic, after Burden’s family left their Tribeca apartment to quarantine in their second home, on Martha’s Vineyard, Burden receives a phone call in which she discovers that her husband of twenty years is having an affair. By the next morning, he has left the island and is asking for a divorce. He rejects their life together; he doesn’t even want to share custody of their three children or any day-to-day parenting responsibilities. Burden had thought that she was happily married.
It’s easy to see why Burden’s story has resonated with so many readers. “Strangers” is a poignant account of how the end of a relationship can cast everything that came before it into shadow and uncertainty; it captures the panic and sorrow of suddenly not being able to recognize the person you are closest to. And, while some of the book’s emotional notes are near-universal, the author’s ancestry adds an irresistible sheen of money and glamour. Burden is a descendant, on her father’s side, of the railroad-and-shipping titan Cornelius Vanderbilt and, on her mother’s side, of Henry Morgan Tilford, one of the founders of Standard Oil; her maternal grandmother was the socialite Babe Paley.
In “Strangers,” Burden also weaves a gripping tale of financial imperilment—of a scion of a Gilded Age fortune brought low when she places too much faith in a secretive husband. The media response to Burden’s book has portrayed it as offering hard-won lessons in personal finance for all women in heterosexual partnerships. When Barrymore praised the book as “an incredible tutorial” on the hazards for women of ceding control over money to their husbands, leading to “scenarios where they are very financially hurt,” Burden replied, “Absolutely. And if I am a cautionary tale on this one subject, I am happy with that.” On NPR, Burden told Summers, “I’ve heard about all-girls schools where they’re going to be creating financial-literacy classes in response to the book, and that makes me incredibly happy.” In an interview with the Daily Beast, Burden said, “If anything comes out of my book, I hope that younger women or contemporaries really take a look at their financial life and think about what would happen to them if the marriage ended.”
In a similar vein, a Wall Street Journal feature took the headline “She Almost Lost Everything in Her Divorce. Now Women Are Learning from Her Mistakes” and called Burden’s memoir a “cautionary tale of financial naiveté.” Real Simple asked, “If a woman who comes from generational wealth can forfeit her financial security in a divorce, are any of us safe?” A feature in the Times described “Strangers” as in part a “financial thriller,” featuring an “oppressive prenup.” The personal-finance influencer Chelsea Fagan, the host of “The Financial Diet,” marvelled that Burden, despite her lineage and law degree, “still managed to end up completely at this man’s mercy and being dragged through an absolute humiliation ritual in divorce court to hold on to the few things that she had.” Fagan added, “If it can happen to her, it can happen to anyone.”
But what happened to her, exactly? A close reading of “Strangers,” and of the media coverage surrounding it, leaves the answer surprisingly muddled. Court documents pertaining to Burden’s marriage and divorce that I obtained, including her prenuptial agreement and her divorce settlement, complicate the issue further.
The details of the prenup were “a big whisper,” Burden told Winfrey, that something was awry in her marriage-to-be. The signed document, she writes in “Strangers,” “glowed like a burning ember in my inbox.” As Burden tells it, her fiancé, Henry P. Davis (called “James” in the book), who was an attorney at the time of their marriage and who later, in 2016, took a position at a hedge fund, had insisted on adding a clause to the prenup, which Burden’s lawyer opposed, stipulating that all income and investments made during the marriage remain separate unless placed in joint name. The couple, who wed in 1999, agreed to share household expenses, but Burden, an attorney who later became a stay-at-home mother, would have no claim on Davis’s income in case of divorce. Likewise, Davis would have no claim on Burden’s income, including that which she received from her inheritance. (Davis did not respond to requests for comment.)
After Davis filed for divorce, Burden writes, she was shocked to discover that he had kept millions of dollars of his income in separate accounts. With much trepidation, she writes, she filed a counterclaim; the claim was dismissed by a judge. Elizabeth Carter, a matrimonial-law professor at Louisiana State University, told me that the couple’s arrangement, in which they kept income separate and shared expenses, is not uncommon. The terms of the prenup might appear more questionable, she said, if one spouse leaves the workforce and loses their only source of income—but this scenario didn’t apply to Burden, who had inherited wealth. “It could be unfair to him if everything she brings in is separate, but he has to give her half of everything he earns,” Carter said.
Margaret Ryznar, a visiting professor at Brooklyn Law School who specializes in trusts and estates, had a somewhat different view on the prenup. “Our modern idea of marriage is that it’s a partnership, and that would be reflected by dividing his earnings in the divorce,” Ryznar told me. “Presumably she enabled him to make those earnings by taking care of the home, taking care of the children, putting his career first,” whereas Davis had no role in generating Burden’s inheritance.
On the podcast “Lipstick on the Rim,” Burden remarked that she had “inherited wealth, shall we say, on both sides—it wasn’t a ton of money.” Her “primary assets,” she explains in “Strangers,” “were held in two trusts.” Burden used the funds in one of these trusts, “in their entirety,” she writes, to purchase the apartment in Tribeca. According to publicly available records, Burden bought the apartment for just under four million dollars, with a million-dollar mortgage, in 2002. “My last trust,” she writes, was put toward the Martha’s Vineyard house. The assets in this trust, she explains, “matched the purchase price exactly, minus a small mortgage.” She paid $5.4 million for the house; the “small mortgage” was, in fact, for three million dollars, according to publicly available records.
Burden returns to the matter of the two trusts often in interviews, usually stressing that they had held most of her assets and that she had drained them to buy the two properties. “I had emptied my trusts to purchase our homes,” she writes in the book. Despite the terms of the prenup, Burden decided to place Davis’s name alongside hers on both deeds. (“I thought that was what you did when you were married—share everything,” she writes.) As a result, when Burden and Davis split up, Davis had a fifty-per-cent stake in both homes, and, for a time in their divorce proceedings, he appeared ready to lay claim to his half of each.
The prospect of losing these homes is an integral plot point in “Strangers.” “I could not afford to buy James out of either home. I would have to sell both,” Burden writes. “My children were going to lose the house they loved, the center of our life as a family, and the apartment where they lived, in addition to managing the emotional toll of their father leaving. I was going to lose what my grandparents and my father had given me, betraying them too. I was going to lose my financial security.” This period—the weeks after the judge dismissed Burden’s counterclaim, when she felt herself slipping into financial quicksand—is the emotional nadir of “Strangers.” “I fell into a deep well of despair and shame,” she writes, adding, “It was the same paralysis I’d felt in the first weeks after James left, but it felt much darker.”
Burden’s interviewers have lingered over this episode as well. “You had to worry about your finances, about losing your home,” Summers said to Burden. “Walk me through how you found yourself in such a precarious financial position.” The podcaster Haley Sacks, of “Financial Tea with Mrs. Dow Jones,” told her audience that “Belle was forced to confront the most terrifying financial reality. . . . She was standing on a trap door with basically no cord to pull.”
During Burden’s “Lipstick on the Rim” appearance, one of the hosts, Molly Sims, explained that, at the time of the divorce, Burden had “no income coming in for her family, and she has to give up half of both homes, and if you don’t pay off the other, they’re gonna make you sell.”
“Yes, exactly,” Burden replied. “And then he had amassed a fortune but it was in his name alone.”
“And he gave you none of that,” Sims said.
“I—no, he gave me none of that. He gives me child support, but I have nothing from that.”
“After twenty years,” Sims said, “he gave you nothing.”
It’s evident from the book, however, that Burden did have her own income, because she affirms that she and Davis shared expenses, as agreed to in their prenup. She also maintained a separate American Express account for purchases that she did not want Davis—whom she portrays as controlling and selectively thrifty—to see. Documents filed in the divorce show that, in 2019, Burden reported an income of a little over eight hundred thousand dollars, including a hundred and ninety thousand dollars from the sale of her mother’s house in the Catskills. (A spokesperson for Burden said that her income that year was atypically high. Davis made well into the seven figures in 2019.)
An examination of the prenup may also undercut the sense that Burden’s long-term financial situation was precarious. Davis’s financial disclosure, as of 1999, listed a little more than two hundred thousand dollars in base salary, plus slightly less than that in “marketable securities/cash,” and noted that he was “entitled to profits” in a seven-figure investment fund. Burden’s disclosure, by contrast, tallied her “Total Financial Assets and Interests in Trusts” at approximately sixty-three million dollars.
These monies included the two trusts that she eventually tapped to buy property. The majority of it was a forty-five-million-dollar share in a trust created from her late father’s estate, which was, and remains, inaccessible to Burden. (The trust is structured to provide resources for Burden’s stepmother until her death, at which point the remainder of its assets, minus any estate taxes, will go to Burden and her brother, its two beneficiaries.) Additionally, Burden had an eight-million-dollar share in a charitable trust and a four-million-dollar interest in WAMBCO, her family’s limited partnership; she had also received a three-hundred-thousand-dollar commission for serving as a trustee of this estate, which included a Hamptons property that sold to the billionaire Stephen Schwarzman for thirty-four million dollars, in 2006, and an eleven-room co-op at 1020 Fifth Avenue, across the street from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, that sold for twenty-two million dollars, in 2012. Burden’s statement closes by noting that “Belle has additional potential, contingent, remote or minor interests in a number of other trusts.” The over-all picture is of a person whose long-term financial security appeared guaranteed.
In the eventual divorce settlement, Burden is listed as a beneficiary of no fewer than five trusts. Apart from those trusts, Burden’s net-worth statement, filed in December, 2020, showed that she had her own Vanguard account and a six-per-cent stake in WAMBCO; the combined value of the two exceeded ten million dollars. All of these resources would remain Burden’s alone in the divorce.
In “Strangers,” Burden describes her mounting dread as the divorce ground on: “As my lawyer and I prepared for trial, I told people what was at stake, what James was threatening.” She writes, “Gradually, as the trial date approached, I started to accept what was going to happen. . . . We would sell the house. We would move to a smaller apartment. I told myself every day, like a mantra, I can do this. I can make a life for us.”
Then, suddenly: “James and I reached a settlement an hour before our trial was set to begin, with terms determined by James.” Burden goes on, “In our limited negotiations, by email, without our lawyers, I had to be calm, deferential, grateful. I had no wiggle room.” Davis agreed to give up both marital properties, and made other concessions, and she can only speculate as to why: “Maybe he always planned to resolve it before trial. . . . But only after he brought me to my knees.” On Sacks’s podcast, Burden recalled, “I ended up, in my divorce, having it threatened until forty-five minutes before trial that I would lose half of my house and half of my apartment and have to sell them.”
According to court records, Burden and Davis never had a trial date scheduled. All the ex-couple had on the docket was a “status conference,” in which parties typically discuss logistics and set future deadlines. (A spokesperson for Burden said that this status conference would have effectively marked the beginning of the trial process.) When I spoke to Carter, she emphasized that the process of reaching a settlement would have been more drawn-out than Burden describes. “The lawyers draft the settlement—there would have been draft settlements going back and forth between the camps during all this time,” Carter said.
In contested divorces, even between couples of significant means, the family home will typically go to the custodial parent, Ryznar told me, in order to minimize disruption to the children’s lives. If such a division isn’t possible, the sale of the property is typically deferred until the youngest child turns eighteen. And, even if Davis had pursued his claim on the properties, it isn’t clear why Burden wouldn’t have been able to keep at least one of the homes. (A spokesperson for Burden said doing so would have been “neither feasible nor financially responsible.”) Burden placed the Tribeca apartment on the market last year for just under twelve million dollars, about three times what she paid for it, and the Martha’s Vineyard house was recently assessed by the town for about $7.7 million, well over two million dollars more than what Burden paid for it.
In the settlement, in addition to letting go of his half of the properties, Davis gave his ex-wife three million dollars out of an investment he had made in WAMBCO. Burden kept the key to the private Black Point Beach, on Martha’s Vineyard, which Davis purchased for her birthday in 2016, and which was most recently valued at more than four hundred thousand dollars. He also agreed to pay Burden fifty thousand dollars per month in baseline child support until their youngest child—now eighteen—turns twenty-two. This six-hundred-thousand-dollar annual tally does not include a raft of additional itemized expenses for each child until he or she reaches age twenty-two, including private-school tuition and associated school fees, tutoring and test prep, summer camps, extracurricular activities, transportation costs, health insurance, and medical, dental, and orthodontic expenses.
When Burden sat for a Q. & A. with New York magazine, the interviewer praised her for being “very frank” about the “rarefied world” that she comes from. “I did want the reader to trust me,” Burden replied, “so it felt like I had to be very open about it.” In “Strangers,” Burden repeatedly acknowledges that she is “lucky” and “privileged.” During the settlement process, she reminds herself, “I had tried to have perspective, to see how privileged I still was, no matter what happened in the divorce. But my fear had made me myopic again, only able to see what I would lose.” No reasonable person would demand that she provide a forensic accounting of her finances in the memoir. Yet its impression of candor may suffer in light of what Burden leaves out of the narrative.
Burden’s publisher, Dial Press, declined to comment. In a statement, Burden said, “When I wrote Strangers, I shared my heartache, my mistakes, and my shame. I owned my privilege as plainly as I could, and I respected the privacy of sealed court records. I stand by everything I wrote, including the fear I felt from my ex-husband’s threats, the contributions I made and could make to my family, and what happened to me financially and emotionally in my marriage and divorce. While I didn’t intend it, I am glad that women have taken my story as motivation for insisting on financial transparency in their marriages.”
In 2007, Mary Karr wrote, in an essay about crafting her acclaimed memoir “The Liars’ Club,” that personal narrative “is not an act of history but an act of memory, which is innately corrupt.” Is writing about money an act of history or of memory? This framework may determine how readers resolve the tensions between “Strangers” and the dry financial statements and citation-clogged legal filings behind some of the book’s pivotal events.
In Burden’s bleak, stunned “Modern Love” column, published three years ago, she scarcely mentioned money at all, yet the spectre of financial jeopardy is a key element of “Strangers.” After the book’s publication, as the all-points media campaign has gathered momentum, the narrative has attuned itself even more to money, and the lack of it.
The version of Davis depicted in “Strangers”—a man who walks away from his partner and his children with no explanation or apparent remorse—has struck a chord of anguished recognition among many of Burden’s readers; she portrays her ex-husband so convincingly as an emotional villain that her audience is naturally primed to accept him as a fiduciary villain. She is a gifted writer, sensitive to pacing and elegant restraint—for example, the agonizing suspense she creates over the question of whether she might lose both her homes effectively eclipses the fact that she didn’t lose them. Her long-term financial security, as opposed to her emotional security, was never at risk. It might be difficult for anyone in her position to separate one from the other. ♦