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Evil, maybe, but there’s something comforting about knowing that even an ultrarich woman can’t make a man act right. You can come from a good family, bring a couple of enormous trusts into the marriage, make some kids, build homes in both New York City and Martha’s Vineyard if you’d like, but he’ll still leave if he wants to. There’s something relieving in that obviousness, in that inevitability, as if no one can truly get heterosexual marriage right, even those with all the resources in the world.
Or at least that’s one conclusion you could draw from Belle Burden’s Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage, a taut new book about the collapse of her marriage to a Manhattan asset manager with his own connections to high society (but certainly less family wealth). Burden and her then-husband “James”—she refers to her husband by pseudonymously—were settling into their home on Martha’s Vineyard in March 2020, as the COVID pandemic was starting, thinking they’d surely just need to hunker down with their children for a few weeks before the virus passed. Instead, she ended up sheltering in place with two of her three kids, alone: James left her for another woman. Perhaps worse, he had no interest in shared custody or co-parenting of their teen and preteen children. He didn’t even get an apartment with enough bedrooms for the kids. It was cold, abnormal, and, according to Burden, entirely sudden.
Strangers originates in part from “Was I Married to a Stranger?,” a New York Times Modern Love column from 2023. “I still have no understanding of why my husband left,” she wrote at the time. “His strangeness only increased, becoming an adversary in the divorce process.” But Burden does know what happened in her marriage. In fact, she writes about it with matter-of-fact precision throughout Strangers, even if she keeps repeating that she has no idea what happened to James.
The memoir preoccupies itself with the two major failures of both her marriage and the marriages of the people who raised her: dishonesty around money and shame around divorce. Burden isn’t just any divorced white woman in New York; she’s a descendant of some of the most glamorous New York divorcées in history. Her mother is Amanda Burden, a famed urban planner who’s now a principal at Bloomberg Associates. Amanda was formerly married to Burden’s father, Shirley Carter Burden Jr., the onetime owner of the Village Voice and New York magazine. She married and divorced Steven Ross, formerly the head of Warner Communications. In the early aughts, she dated Charlie Rose. Burden’s grandmother was Babe Paley, former Vogue editor, many times divorced from several men who couldn’t stop cheating on her. The real James also has a society pedigree, but his family lost their wealth, and he spent much of his adulthood trying to regain it. The way Burden tells the story, James’ father emotionally abandoned his family after their fortune dwindled.
Strangers recounts how James requested that Burden’s family’s generations-old prenup allow for separate finances that would remain yours in the case of a divorce. Burden buys them two houses with her trust funds as he hoards his high income in a private account and demands that his extremely wealthy wife annotate their credit card statements every month. In their divorce, he briefly attempts to take his half of both houses—paid for, again, by Burden. (He eventually backs off on uprooting her and the children.)
James’ financial control was one problem, but Burden also had decades of social conditioning to break. She comes from generations of women who have been cheated on by their husbands. Her grandmother, mother, and stepmother had all tolerated their husbands flirting too hard or maintaining quiet (and noisy) affairs. It was the men in their lives who squandered their money, made them leave their jobs in order to tend to the house, and still they were never treated as equal parties in their marriages. She tells this story plainly, without judgment or request for sympathy. This is just how her family worked for years and years, until she decided that it didn’t have to.
Even for Burden—rich, white, straight, secure—talking loudly about exactly how her ex left her and their three children during the very beginning of the pandemic was a rebellion. “He planned to tell people that our separation was amicable, a joint decision,” she writes in Strangers. “He said it would be better, for my own well-being, to say that I wanted it too.”
It’s a story Burden has told and been told a thousand times, first by the women who raised her, and eventually by the man who abandoned her. The expectation from James, from his extended family, and even from some in her own circle was to shut her mouth, move through the divorce with the same grace shown by the women before her, and keep it friendly for the sake of the kids. Instead, she wrote it all down, its own disobedience in a community where being an angry single woman is still a controversial stance. “James had twisted the story of our ending into something that made him comfortable, one in which he hadn’t even left me,” Burden writes. “And so had I, at times, believing what James and the others said. Writing it felt like a flashlight in that haze. This is what happened.”
Even after she publishes her Modern Love essay, she’s faced with more criticism and shame from the people in her community, those who think she should have shut up for the sake of the kids. There’s more opprobrium for Burden telling people what happened than for James’ action and inaction. “What if,” she writes, “telling the story publicly, saying what happened to us, actually helps my kids? What if seeing their mother rise, seeing her claim her life, giving clarity to their experience, is the greater gift?”
Shame is often our own equalizer, the last resort in systems where there’s no further justice to be found. In Strangers, the shame of being left, of being divorced, of having to start over, finds Burden even in her obvious wealth and privilege. The refusal to hold that shame is what has driven her to memoir, offering a story simple enough that anyone who’s ever had a husband can find themselves in it. Maybe it’s James who should carry more shame. He seems only lightly aware of the embarrassment he caused her in the way he left, and hardly that concerned about his own humiliation; as Burden writes in the book, her ex-husband approved her Modern Love column, and it seems as if her children were on board with her writing too.
It’s disappointing how mutinous it still is to tell people what your husband did. Even for Burden—connected, rich, white, straight, attractive—it remains a mutiny to speak the truth in public. Her book defies three generations of social conditioning, a brutal reminder that even wealth could not protect her from cruelty. But marriage didn’t give her purpose either. Burden stayed home to raise their children so that her husband could work around the clock and make all that money he didn’t share. When she finally did return to work after their separation, it was not just in creative nonfiction but in the legal work she abandoned after becoming a wife. She now does pro bono immigration law. Through her work, her own suffering is put into sharp contrast. It’s a helpful reminder for the reader too: It could be so much worse, and you may be in a better position than most to rescue yourself.
Most readers will be primed to groan at Burden’s still-very-nice life, and it’s not necessary to feel sorry for the weeping divorcée roaming through the several bedrooms of her property on Martha’s Vineyard. But Burden offered a book that’s exactly what it needed to be. It’s merely a story about the end of her marriage and about what she did to change her life. There’s no second husband or perfect boyfriend. Her children still seem to have their own struggles with their father’s choices. There are no big answers to her big questions. He just didn’t want to be married anymore, and he handled it the way a car crashes into a median, while expecting her to keep her chin up and let him keep the membership at the club. Burden’s story isn’t necessarily unique, and it’s certainly not new. But her attempt to untangle it, for herself and women in lousy marriages everywhere, is still revolutionary.
Update, Jan. 29, 2026: This piece has been updated with the full name of Burden’s father.
