There is a lot of buzz about Belle Burden’s Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage. I even joined in pairing it with another review in this piece. I really enjoyed the book. As I saw it there were two threads of tension running all the way through. One was trying to figure out why her husband, referred to as James, suddenly decided to up and leave her and the kids during COVID. The other was the financial issue. There was a prenup that had allowed him to stash the megabucks he was making in his own name. Belle on the other hand had emptied trust funds set up for her to buy two homes one in Tribeca and the other on Martha’s Vineyard that she put in joint name.
The tension on the second one was whether her husband, whom she refers to as James is going to be a mensch or enforce the prenup, which would have her lose possibly both homes, since she can’t buy him out. I found the whole thing frustrating as there were no numbers in the book.
There has been negative commentary about her narrative indicating that she doesn’t acknowledge or appreciate the high level of privilege she has experienced. I actually think that she explicitly does acknowledge it:
“I said, “Other women face much more dire consequences. I should not complain.” I had tried to have perspective, to see how privileged I still was, no matter what happened in the divorce. But my fear had made me myopic again, only able to see what I would lose.”
Her volunteer legal work kept in touch with people who had much more severe problems:
“Our client’s father promptly filed an asylum application with the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), listing his wife and daughter as co-applicants. He was a teacher but the only work he could find was driving a taxi in Brooklyn. In March 2020, the same month my family and I arrived at our second home, he drove sick people back and forth to the hospital in his taxi. He soon contracted COVID and, after being refused an ambulance twice, he died. He had waited five years for an asylum interview; the interview notice arrived six months after his death.”
Into the fray enters Jessica Winter with What’s Missing From Belle Burden’s “Strangers” in The New Yorker.. Damn thing is behind a paywall. Cost me over fifty bucks. Hope there is something else good in The New Yorker in the next year.
“But what happened to her, exactly? A close reading of “Strangers,” and of the media coverage surrounding it, leaves the answer surprisingly muddled. Court documents pertaining to Burden’s marriage and divorce that I obtained, including her prenuptial agreement and her divorce settlement, complicate the issue further.”
It would have really been great if a link to “the court documents” were included. When Ms. Winter starts sharing numbers she leads with, referring to the prenup:
“Burden’s disclosure, by contrast, tallied her “Total Financial Assets and Interests in Trusts” at approximately sixty-three million dollars.”
She then notes that the majority of that is $45 million “structured to provide resources for Burden’s stepmother until her death”. It also includes the trusts that went into buying the houses. That is really beyond irrelevant to the problem Burden faced in having to buy her husband out of the houses. She also has an “eight-million-dollar share in a charitable trust”. What, exactly, does that mean? If it is a charitable lead trust or a charitable remainder trust, it could be years before it gives her spendable money. If it something like a donor advised fund where she has the right to make recommendations for charitable donations that will more than likely be followed, it can never legitimately provide her money to use personally. Then there is a four-million-dollar interest in WAMBCO, the family limited partnership. That may or may not be able to tapped for immediate liquidity. Then there are contingent, remote or minor interests in a number of other trusts.
I love the contingent and remote interests. You know David Armstrong-Jones, 2nd Earl of Snowden could be the next King of the United Kingdom. Of course 25 other people would have to die first. Remember King Ralph. So much for remote and contingent interests.
In her memoir, Belle Burden acknowledges that she is very privileged. She is devastated to suddenly discover that her husband wants to leave her. She doesn’t understand why he wants to be a Disney dad rather than share custody. And she fears that his position on the prenup will force her to buy him out of the two houses or sell one or both of them. Reddit scuttlebutt puts the combined value of the two homes around $20 million.
The book has no numbers and now Jessica Winter’s has gotten key documents with numbers. Rather than organizing them in columns like I might, she gives them to us in a narrative. Examining the whole narrative, I don’t see ten million bucks that can be used to buy James out of his share of the houses. So the numbers, such as they are, support Belle’s narrative.
Spoiler Alert
As it turned out “James” conceded that Belle could keep the homes when they settled before going into litigation. I really like Strangers. I question its value as a cautionary tale for most regular people facing divorce. More useful might be my countless articles on the hazards of filing joint returns in the last year of marriage. If you want the warning in memoir form try Innocent Spouse: A Memoir by Carol Ross. Strangers is more focused on emotions. The details are too sketchy, even with what the New Yorker piece adds, to use it to derive practical lessons. It is still a great read.
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