Belle Burden’s memoir Strangers might be the most talked about book of the year. Since its January publication, book clubs have been buzzing with takes on this tell-all memoir, which follows the author’s very public, very gutting divorce from the man she thought she was happily married to. In reviews, the book has been framed like a Wharton tragedy: this is the tale of an innocent woman who lets her guard down and loses it all…
Heralded as a cautionary tale for women who cede financial independence in marriage—or dare to sign a constricting prenup—Strangers has clearly struck a nerve in our tradwife-pilled collective subconscious. So much so that the memoir was recently the subject of a Hollywood bidding war, which Gwyneth Paltrow won.
All well and good—even if the log-line here may remind some of you of this goofy scene from the Sex and the City movie. But this week, the plot thickened. In a probing piece for The New Yorker, journalist Jessica Winter took a hard look at Burden’s financial profile—and incidentally turned up some holes in the narrative that has defined her divorce as tragic for chiefly financial reasons.
“The media response to Burden’s book has portrayed it as offering hard-won lessons in personal finance for all women in heterosexual partnerships,” Winter wrote, citing sympathetic coverage in Real Simple, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times. But what actually does losing it all mean to a descendant of scions?
