Is Belle Burden's 'Strangers' another fake memoir?
In a new interview, Burden recasts some of what she said in her No. 1 bestseller, and that's not the only reason to question her story of her divorce
Lately I’ve wondered if a bizarre literary micro-trend is emerging. Call it Suspicious Memoirs by Rich White Hedge-Funders’ Wives With the Same Editor and Publisher.
You might argue that two books hardly amount to a trend, even when both have been No. 1 bestsellers. But if you’ve worked in newsrooms, as I have, you’ve seen evidence of a rule of thumb among journalists: Two’s a coincidence, three’s a trend. So I suspected I might be seeing the birth of another when I noticed a curious similarity in two recent bestsellers published by the Dial Press imprint of Penguin Random House and edited by Whitney Frick.
First came the most shameful memoir of 2025: The Tell, billed as the true story of how venture capitalist Amy Griffin “recovered” memories of sexual abuse by a middle-school teacher after she took a hallucinogen while married to the founder of a hedge fund that invested in psychedelic drugs. Oprah, Reese, and Jenna made it the first joint selection of their book clubs. But Griffin’s claims were so flimsy and conflict-of-interest–riddled that they inspired a front-page exposé in New York Times.
Now comes a second memoir from Dial editor Frick that might leave you shaking your head. In Strangers, Belle Burden describes how her 20-year marriage collapsed after a stranger called her to say that her husband was having an affair with his wife.
Early in the pandemic, Burden and her family were quarantining at their summer home on Martha’s Vineyard when, she says, her husband blindsided her with “devastating” news. He wanted a divorce without shared custody of their three children, the youngest of whom was 12.
Until then, Burden believed she and her husband were “entirely united” in their marriage. Yes, she descends from Vanderbilts and others steeped in old money and social cachet, and he had a father who had lost a self-made fortune. But, Burden said, “There was absolutely nothing that made me worried.” She saw no red flags to suggest that her husband might walk out without warning. If her husband ever made phone calls in the driveway on the pretext that the TV was too loud, she doesn’t mention it.
Now Burden has recast some aspects of her self-justifying story. In a new Daily Beast podcast, she says there were “clear signs” she “willfully did not see” of potential marital trouble.