A report in the New Yorker has raised questions about Strangers, the bestselling memoir by lawyer Belle Burden.
Burden’s book, published in January by Dial Press, tells the story of the author’s divorce from her husband, who left her suddenly during the early days of the Covid-19 lockdown. A critic for Kirkus called the book “a measured, empathetic, and modern response to an enraging callousness.”
In the book, Burden writes that she and her ex-husband, Henry P. Davis, had signed a prenuptial agreement, stipulating that the income each partner earned during the marriage would remain separate. The couple were married in New York, which, like most U.S. states, is not a community property state.
Burden used money from two trusts to buy two homes, one in Manhattan and one on Martha’s Vineyard. She put her husband on the deeds to both properties. She writes that she was worried that in the divorce, she would lose her homes: “I could not afford to buy James out of either home. I would have to sell both. 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.”
Reporter Jessica Winter writes that Burden is a beneficiary of five trusts and, at the time of her divorce, had a net worth of more than $10 million.
In a statement, Burden responded, “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.”
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
