A divorce, a fortune and a bestseller: The memoir everyone is arguing about |
A divorce, a fortune and a bestseller: The memoir everyone is arguing about
June 1, 2026 — 12:54pm
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Back in the 1980s, Australian writer Clive James wrote a rollicking series of stories from his youth called Unreliable Memoirs. American humorist P. J. O’Rourke wrote of these bestsellers, “Honesty comes in various types and the best is exaggeration ... Clive exaggerates to wonderfully honest effect.”
Fast forward to our own times, and any memoir deemed unreliable is soon at the end of an investigative hatchet job. Take Belle Burden’s runaway bestseller memoir Strangers, about a tragedy that is both ordinary and extraordinary.
Ordinary, because it’s the all-too-frequent tale of a woman whose husband walks out on her and their children after 20 years of what she believed was a happy marriage. A Boston Globe review described it as a “brutally resonant, clear-eyed portrait that strikes universal chords”.
Extraordinary, because both Burden and her husband were mega-rich. She was an heiress from a wealthy family. Yet the impression from her book and in interviews was that she had been dudded out of a fortune and had completely lost her financial security. As one commentator said, “If it can happen to her, it can happen to anyone.”
What exactly did happen to her? Writer Jessica Winter decided to follow the money.........