A strong contender for the most satisfying TV clip of the year comes from a recent interview by Oprah Winfrey with the writer Belle Burden, whose memoir, Strangers, was parked at the top of the US bestseller lists for months. Burden tells the story of how her husband coldly walked out on his family, only returning, she tells Winfrey, to inform the kids the marriage was over and demand of the wife on whom he had cheated, “I’m starving – can you make me a sandwich?”
There are many small cruelties in the book, but this, among the worst, triggers outright pantomime incredulity from Winfrey, who murmurs, “Even the cameraman said ‘oh’.” Burden wanted to model kindness in front of her daughters; she wanted to show her husband exactly what he had walked out on. “So,” says Winfrey, arriving at what appears to be the outer limits of her famous ability to empathise, “you made him the sandwich?!!” Burden smiles, weakly. “I made the sandwich.”
Strangers: A Memoir of a Marriage has become a phenomenon since it was published in January, triggering endless discussion about how much anyone really knows about their partner. As well as admiration for Burden, a 56-year-old who – throughout a storm of publicity – has conducted herself with dignity, sanity and what looks like non-media-trained sincerity. The book offers a window into a world of ultra wealth and privilege: Burden is an heiress on both sides, the granddaughter of the socialite Babe Paley on one, and the Vanderbilts on the other.
Mainly, however, the book has soared because of what it says about women being taken advantage of by their husbands. The cruelty shocks: when Burden’s husband leaves, it’s with the words, “I thought I wanted our life, but I don’t,” and later he tells her she can have full custody of the kids – but it’s the financial endangerment that comes after the separation that spurred feverish discussion and, more recently, intense controversy.
Of course, any anointment of a memoir by Winfrey carries with it a strong possibility that, shortly after the fanfare, allegations that the book has a troubling relationship with the truth will arise. So it is with Strangers; two weeks ago, the New Yorker published a blockbuster investigation into what it characterised as serious omissions in Burden’s telling of her story, specifically the financial stuff. In overview: Burden claimed that her husband, a hedge-funder, shielded his own income in the divorce settlement while threatening to pursue her for half the value of the couple’s two homes, both of which she had bought with her own money. She said this left her in a dire financial situation that might have resulted in her losing both.
According to the New Yorker, Burden, who gave up work as a successful lawyer when she had children and writes in the book that she has no income, failed to mention the fact that divorce documents show that in 2019 she reported an income of $800,000. Furthermore, while Burden writes that she used up the bulk of her trust funds in the purchase of the family homes, the New Yorker finds that she and her brother are joint beneficiaries of a $45m share in a trust that will pay out to them after the death of their stepmother. When she writes about the unfairness of a divorce settlement governed by a prenup that Burden felt she shouldn’t have signed – and that gave her no claim on her husband’s income in the event of divorce – it might have been a good idea to mention the apparent financial security in her background.
Burden hasn’t commented on these claims, and what is curious is how the balance of public favour still seems to be firmly in her corner. While no one is rushing to defend Moth and Raynor Winn, the pair at the centre of the Salt Path scandal, many of Burden’s defenders online point out that any omissions in the memoir are simply the result of justifiable narrative decisions. None of the fundamentals have changed; the man who walked out on her was and still is despicable. Burden remains immensely likable and apparently self-aware. Women are often left high and dry after a punitive divorce. And so on.
What to make of it all? A generous interpretation would be that the very wealthy experience financial precariousness in ways that are almost impossible for the rest of us to process: $800,000, after tax, becomes a negligible amount. And while pleading poverty when you are, by any normal standards, completely rolling in it, is usually enough to shut off the spigot of public sympathy, Belle Burden still somehow comes out of it wronged, a woman with no idea who she was married to.
Anyway, Gwyneth Paltrow has snapped up the film rights and, assuming she doesn’t give two hoots about any of this, I look forward to seeing how Burden’s image survives being played by Paltrow and what it does, if anything, to our biases.
Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist
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