Belle Burden wanted to be a writer and was admitted to a creative-writing class in college, “one of only two freshmen,” she states proudly in Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage. But after reading her first short story aloud in class, she was bashed by a lout named Greg. “He was tall, white, and very punk rock — short, spiky blond hair, a torn concert T-shirt, big black combat boots, a leather jacket.”

Burden was crushed by his criticism. “I had taken Greg’s assessment as the truth, storing it in every cell of my body.” She immediately changed her major and focused on public service; following a fellowship in New York City government, she enrolled in law school.

There, she falls in love with a law student, identified in the book as “James,” who soon proposes marriage. If this were a movie, you might begin to hear dissonant chords in the background as James resists signing a prenup until certain changes are made to it. Then, as they plan their wedding, he inexplicably nixes dancing at the reception, much to the disappointment of his bride-to-be, who writes that it was her “one regret about that day.” Eventually, James drops out of law school to pursue a career in finance.

The background music begins to sound even more discordant, almost eerie, when he asks his new wife to liquidate one of her two trusts in order to purchase their large Manhattan apartment. She agrees, listing James as co-owner “even though he had not contributed to the purchase. I was happy to be able to do it,” she explains. “It felt like an offering to him, to our marriage, to the family we were going to create.”

Later — and again at her husband’s behest — she doesn’t hesitate to raid her remaining trust to purchase the Martha’s Vineyard summer home he covets:

“After five years of marriage, I believed even more strongly in our partnership, in our commitment to each other.”

That belief shatters the day James announces out of the blue that he wants to leave the marriage Burden thought was happy, even joyful. He drops his bomb without regret or apology and then tra-la-las out of their home, leaving behind three adolescent children for his wife to shepherd through the covid pandemic, refusing even to share custody. Burden was gobsmacked:

“He never told me, not once, that he was discontent in our marriage, unhappy with me, or struggling in our life together.”

She was further blindsided to learn, during the production of documents required for their divorce, that her enterprising husband had become a multimillionaire. “I saw year after year of his earnings, investment returns and bonuses, accumulating into a fortune, which he held in his name alone…I didn’t know he’d earned millions of dollars each year…He had not hidden it. I had chosen not to look…not to know.”

Burden divides the dissolution of her marriage into five parts, and opens each segment of the book with a scene involving the ospreys perched high on an aerie near her Vineyard home. It’s an artful metaphor: Ospreys mate for life, an aspiration that eluded Belle, as it had her mother, Amanda Burden, and her famous grandmother, Babe Paley — women of enormous wealth and social privilege who endured the public humiliations of errant men.

Although the author grants her husband a pseudonym in these pages, a quick computer check reveals his identity, as well as that of her mother’s on-again, off-again lover of 30 years, former TV host Charlie Rose, who was fired from PBS and CBS after being accused by more than 30 women of sexual harassment.

One wonders why the women in Burden’s family — American aristocrats with social stature and financial independence — would tolerate tabloid shaming from their promiscuous partners. Burden writes as if it’s a genetic defect that she, along with her mother and grandmother, simply inherited, “an acceptance of men behaving badly.”

In this unputdownable book, Burden proves to that college lunkhead Greg that she’s a writer of style and substance, something that may astound her ex-husband. As she dissects their divorce in searing detail, you can almost hear the waves of applause thundering across the country and driving the memoir to the bestseller list, where it remains six months after its release. Just as sweet for the discarded wife is the sale of her story to Netflix, with Gwyneth Paltrow contracted to play the lead.

Not since Nora Ephron wrote Heartburn has a wronged wife stepped forward to so effectively reap literary rewards from a wayward husband. Cue here the resounding drums of a Shakespearean triumph, for Belle Burden has taken “arms against a sea of troubles. And by opposing [ended] them.”

Kitty Kelley is the author of seven number-one New York Times bestseller biographies, including Nancy Reagan, Jackie Oh!, and Elizabeth Taylor: The Last Star. She is on the board of the Independent and is a recipient of the PEN Oakland/Gary Webb Anti-Censorship Award. In 2023, she was honored with the Biographers International Organization’s BIO Award, which is given annually to a writer who has made major contributions to the advancement of the art and craft of biography.