Belle Burden’s Divorce Memoir Has High Society and Hollywood Buzzing
7 min readDespite descending from New York royalty, Belle Burden lived a quiet, happy life out of the spotlight for 53 years. As much as a Vanderbilt heiress could anyway.
Then she blew it all up with a viral “Modern Love” essay detailing her hedge-fund husband of 20 years abruptly leaving her and their three kids at the start of the pandemic. Unlike the famed women in her bloodline (you may know her socialite grandmother, Babe Paley, from FX’s Feud), she refused to stay quiet about her husband’s infidelity and other upper-crust taboos—complete with prenup drama, a contentious divorce, and snooty social club rejections.
Strangers, her page-turner of the divorce and its aftermath, captured the hearts of Hollywood and high society alike. Fans include Katie Couric, Judy Blume, and everyone in your—and your mom’s—book clubs. The first-time author’s memoir became an instant New York Times bestseller, followed by a bidding war over film rights, with Gwyneth Paltrow executive producing and scoring the lead role.
On a cloudy spring day this week in New York City, Burden shares the fallout—and despite it all, rebirth—with ELLE. Like in her memoir, she is vulnerable, kind, forthright, and self-aware. Read on for her take on Gwyneth, how the book impacted her kids, and why she made peace with the financial mistakes of her past. And yes, we get into the outrageous sandwich scene.
Your book debuted on The New York Times bestseller list in January and hasn’t left since. What has surprised you most about the reception so far?
I’m honestly really surprised it’s doing so well. I was rejected by all the major book clubs—Oprah and Reese and Drew—so I thought, This is not going to be a big hit, and that’s okay. So when it exploded right away, I was quite surprised. I did not expect this kind of immediate enthusiasm, and it’s been really wonderful. It has felt like a tidal wave of support from mostly women (and some men) around the world really seeing themselves in it.
Variety reported that there was a “heated six-way” bidding war over the film rights, which have now sold to Netflix, with Gwyneth Paltrow set to portray you.
It’s hard to imagine any great actress playing me. It feels like such a leap, but I think she would be great. She was so fantastic in Marty Supreme and it’s so great she’s returning to acting.
I’m assuming you would negotiate the production rights after writing an op-ed in the Times criticizing how your grandmother, Babe Paley, was portrayed in FX’s Feud: Capote vs. the Swans.
I have no interest in writing the script, but I would want to be involved in the process since it’s my life.
Have any celebrities slid into your DMs?
[Laughs.] No, no celebrities sliding into my DMs, but I got to meet Judy Blume last week in Key West, and for me, that’s such an exciting thing because I worshipped her as a kid, as a writer. She taught me to read. She wrote the first books that I ever got excited about reading.
For my next book, I’m trying to write fiction, which is what I wrote when I was a teenager. And I haven’t tried it in 30 years. I find it so much harder because I don’t know what’s going to happen next. Judy Blume actually told me the characters will tell you what happens next, and I like that.
Were there any negative reactions to the book that surprised you?
The negative is what I expected, which is: you should not speak openly about the transgressions of your children’s father. So that does not surprise me.
One surprising thing was the very strong feelings around me making the sandwich [for my ex-husband after we told our kids we were getting a divorce]. Some people didn’t really understand why I would’ve made it, and the key issue is that my daughter was sitting right there. I was really wrestling with what to model for her, and wanting to model that her dad and I would continue to be caring and kind to each other. Some people had seen it just as my compliance and being a doormat, but it was more complex than that.
How have your kids reacted to the book now that it’s out in the world?
It’s been a slow process, because first there was a decision around “Modern Love,” and then there was a decision around signing the book deal, and then two-and-a-half years went by, and I waited until my youngest daughter was 18 to publish. I never wanted to ask their permission because I think that is too heavy a choice for kids to make, because you’re asking them to decide between supporting their mom and hurting their dad, but I did want to be very transparent and listen to them and hear their feelings about it. Their strongest feelings were changing their names in it, which I did. I had different fake names for them, and they wanted new ones.
I try not to talk very much about how they feel about the book because that is their opinion to share, not mine. I will say that they’re very proud of me, and they also love and support their dad, so I am conscious every day that this is very complicated for them.
How involved were your kids in deciding what to omit and what to include?
They were not involved at that level. I was conscious the whole time I wrote it that they were going to read it. So there is nothing in the book that they had not lived through themselves or been aware of. My hope is that I have actually reconstructed for them the love story between their father and me, our many happy years as a family. When marriages end like this, it becomes only about the terrible ending, and everything before it gets lost, and I did not want that for them. I didn’t want that for myself. I don’t want that for my ex-husband, so I really thought about them the whole time that I wrote [it].
Given how intense the divorce was, were you at all worried about being sued over the book?
I went through four very, very rigorous legal reviews, and I feel very comfortable that I have written something that cannot be attacked legally. Random House in the U.S. and U.K. was not going to publish something that did not have backup for every single thing. I will say that my ex and I do not have an NDA in our settlement agreement.
Do you have any sense of how your ex-husband responded to it?
I know he read it last summer. Someone gave him a galley, but he has never told me what he thinks of it.
That feels like good news, I think.
Yeah, hopefully no news is good news, who knows? I do have sympathy. It’s a lot for one person to handle.
I can’t stop thinking about the financial vulnerability you faced because of what the Times described as an “oppressive” prenup. Against your family lawyer’s advice, you agreed to your ex-husband’s request to revise it so that anything earned during the marriage wouldn’t be split in a divorce, while anything held in both your names would be. I wonder whether it might have been better not to have a prenup at all under New York law, but the revised agreement he pushed for seems to have taken things to the worst possible place.
Well, it went to the worst place because I agreed to change it. So if I hadn’t agreed to change it, it probably would have been the best-case scenario for me because I would have kept what I came into the marriage with, and we would have split what was earned during the marriage. But as you read, I put my assets into joint name, and he did not. I try not to talk about the prenup that much because I am not a trust and estates lawyer and I’m not an accountant, but I do think it’s really important to have these conversations before you get married, whether you sign a prenup or not.
Did the prenup ever cross your mind when you put both your names on the houses you bought with your money?
I did think about it. I just thought that we were going to share everything. I thought that when he started earning money, that he would share that with me. It didn’t occur to me that he wouldn’t. The prenup said that we would share anything that we put into joint name. So I assumed that he would share his assets, and I can’t go into more detail about that.
When you used your trust money to buy the family homes, do you think (maybe even subconsciously) you were trying to correct a power imbalance tied to your inherited wealth?
I was conscious of the power imbalance, and I never wanted him to feel less than. I think we try to build men up, and so often that is around finances and them being in charge of finances, but I think my decision to put our homes in joint name was really from a place of love and an intention to share everything.
What do you hope readers will take away from the book?
I hope that women who are going through something similar feel less alone. I think that’s probably my most important thing. I hope that it makes people understand a little bit more the emotional damage that is left behind sometimes when marriages end. I hope that both my contemporaries, older and younger, take it as a wake-up call about really paying attention to their finances.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.