NOTES FROM THE WORKING CLASS: Belle’s Big Burden

Stranger: A Memoir of Marriage
by Belle Burden
The Dial Press
256 pp

Belle Burden was given the opportunity to write a big book about divorce. Burden’s book, Stranger: A Memoir of Marriage, is a tell-all about nothing at all. It could be perceived as revenge porn, but the characters never take off their clothes to have hot sex.

Belle Burden had a privileged and picture-perfect life. A Harvard-educated lawyer and heiress with ties to old money, she sheltered in place from the pandemic with her husband and children on Martha’s Vineyard. Just as she was settling into the cozy romance of her twenty-year marriage, her husband announced that he was leaving her. She never saw it coming. Not a clue.

He offered no real explanation. She’s been dumped.

In Burden’s own words, “I had a home, money, an isolated location to quarantine — I was safe by every measure. But my partner, who promised to protect me and our children, had disappeared overnight.”

A million women divorce each year. Divorced women are the obvious target audience for this book. But these women do not rely on family wealth and a vast network of old money to get them a big book deal. Most divorced women are working-class or poor. And if these women were not among the lower-socioeconomic classes, then the realities of divorce will most certainly put them there. Fifty percent of divorced women live below the poverty line.

Opportunities for less privileged divorced women might include working as a checker at Target or Walmart, but unlike Burden, these women are in touch with reality; they do know why their husbands have left them.  

Her hedge fund manager husband is “tall, blonde and lean.” According to Burden, “He wasn’t affectionate or adoring, but I felt a current of abiding love. He never flirted with other women in front of me. We didn’t bicker. He seemed content and invested in our life.”

In the book, Burden’s husband’s name is changed to James. His real name is Henry, but no one would ever figure that out, not his three children, not his co-workers, not the members of his private club on Martha’s Vineyard. After James (Henry) left his wife, he was gone for days. He did not contact his children, but wait a minute, the plot thickens, his children did not try to contact him.

When James (Henry) does return to their vacation home on Martha’s Vineyard, he asks her for a copy of their prenuptial agreement. Then he tells her he’s hungry and asks her to make him a sandwich. She makes his sandwich, oozing with kindness and love, thinking if she makes him the best possible sandwich, she will win him back.

“I thought I knew my husband of 20 years. I didn’t — and still don’t,” Burden says.

One NYT interviewer described Burden’s story as powerful, but that comment is full-a-shit, another paid endorsement. Belle Burden’s story is pitiful. She could not possibly know her husband because she does not know herself.

Two self-absorbed people were living frictionless lives. On a deeper level there’s nothing going on here that the world needs to know. What will a working-class woman, who is forced to sling hash in a local Greek Diner—to feed her family—going to learn from the plight of Belle Burden?

Big publishers (The Dial Press is a division of the behemoth Random House) have not figured out that Belle’s Big Book is another reason why we have Trump. The white working class was led to believe that Trump would rescue them from the tyranny of the elite. The story of any rich woman is always infinitely more important than the millions of stories about women struggling to make ends meet. Belle’s Book is not about a marriage gone wrong. It’s about the triumph of the elite over the working class.

Belle Burden’s hammered-out tale (via her team of editors) is a lyrical rendition of her resilience without struggle. Her recovery is only possible due to her inherited wealth. The nanny is always looming nearby in the park. Private schools and cello lessons abound. Multiple homes. Kids get admission to top-tier colleges. Town car service. Entire summers spent on Martha’s Vineyard in pursuit of the elusive Osprey.

It costs far more to promote a big book than it costs to do the actual book deal. Burden’s book has been given the big book treatment, the multi-million dollar rollout, an instant #1 New York Times Bestseller!

Endorsed by literati Graydon Carter and Joyce Carol Oates, the book is the subject of an hour-long podcast in the NYT, and is being lauded in People Magazine, Publishers Weekly, Oprah Daily, Vanity Fair, Town and Country Magazine and on ABC News; it’s featured On There with Katie Couric, and in a million pop up ads on your phone and on social media.

The Headlines are consistent: In March 2020, Belle Burden, a Harvard-educated lawyer and heiress, learned that her husband of 20 years wanted a divorce.

So…

The elite do suffer, but extreme wealth lessens the grief of divorce like a soothing balm. Being rich, entitled and educated is a hedge against having to stand in line at a Food Bank. Belle Burden’s life is still picture-perfect. Hailed by People Magazine as a thrilling new literary talent, what will Burden write about next?

Turning Fifty, Fierce and Fabulous could be the title of her next book.

Women have been spurned and rejected since the beginning of time, but they don’t land a multi-million dollar book deal—And that is the real story.  

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I have written film scripts, press materials, content, essays, articles, book reviews, and ten books, including the Yonkers Trilogy, and several nonfiction works, including The Death of a Library: An American Tragedy.  I founded Xanthus Communications, a national P.R. firm, and the media company PR for People®, where people share their news with the world. Although I have retired from the P.R. firm, I continue to manage the PR for People media outlet as a pro-bono enterprise. NOTES FROM THE WORKING-CLASS is a collection of essays inspired by the reality of growing up in a working-class culture. --Patricia Vaccarino