Letter from a Reader 5.25.26
How tone-deaf is 'Strangers' author Belle Burden? She had $63 million in 'assets' and 'interests' but claims she feared losing her homes. Now she says her year's best meal was in Paris
Here on the Gulf Coast, the butts are smoking. That’s not an obscene comment. Smoked pork butts are a favorite at Memorial Day and other barbecues in the South. To do them right, you have to smoke them for hours in the Big Green Egg or other smoker on your deck or patio. My sympathies to all of you who arose at 5 a.m. to start the cooking!
Did you start celebrating early enough to miss the terrific exposé of all the holes in Belle Burden’s hit memoir, Strangers, that the The New Yorker did earlier this weekend? It’s so good, I devoted my entire Letter from a Reader 5.23.26 to it instead of doing my usual roundup of shorter items about books and journalism.
Burden’s book has gained traction with book clubs as far from New York as my small town in Alabama. And a point in my last newsletter bears repeating if your group is considering it. No book club should do Strangers without reading Jessica Winter’s eye-opening investigative report on Burden’s finances on the Page-Turner blog for The New Yorker.
You know the big deal Burden has made in her book and interviews with stars like Oprah about how she was afraid of losing her homes because of a bad prenup she signed voluntarily after having worked as a lawyer for a high-prestige New York firm?
She had $63 million in ‘Financial Assets and Interests in Trusts’
Winter unearthed a copy that prenup and found that on it, Burden tallied her “Total Financial Assets and Interests in Trusts” at roughly $63 million. Some of that money was tied up in trusts and inaccessible. But Burden scraped together enough to buy an apartment in Tribeca for just under $4 million. She also bought a second home on Martha’s Vineyard for $5.4 million, “minus a small mortgage,” which turned out to be $3 million.
Yes, Burden could have been reckless enough to blow all her wealth by the time her husband walked out on her. But if that’s true, how do we know she wasn’t also reckless with facts in Strangers? That was my question after reading it. Or, as I put it in the title of my review of the book, “Is Belle Burden’s Strangers another fake memoir?”
Incredibly, the New York Times keeps falling all over itself to rave about the book. Days before The New Yorker story broke, the Times interviewed Burden about her dining habits for a Where to Eat column called, “ ‘Strangers’ Author Belle Burden Doesn’t Want Eggs Outside Breakfast.” Editor Nikita Richardson begins by calling Strangers “one of this year’s most thoughtful and heart-wrenching books.” It gets worse when Burden responds to: “Where did you enjoy your favorite meal this year?” Burden named an Italian restaurant in Paris where she took her daughter and four friends that she found “amazing.”
This might read like satire if you’ve read about Burden’s fears of losing her homes during her divorce. Or you might see it as simply more tone-deafness on the part of a first-time author.
Journalists and publicists may have a different view.