Like many others, I was fascinated to read Belle Burden’s “Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage” (2026) – a memoir about the abrupt and unexpected end of her twenty-year marriage. The main narrative in the book deals with Belle and her husband’s prenuptial agreement, the added amendment to it, the surprising and unanticipated end of the marriage, and its aftermath. Much has been written about this.
What struck me most about Burden’s account were two unexpected themes – the first is the close family relationship Burden had with her stepmother Susan, dating from her childhood, after her father remarried after his divorce from her mother. And the second is how Belle lost faith in herself and her talents (especially, ironically, her ability to write), and how that affected her life — a malady in socialization that affects many young women and changes the course of their lives.
Belle is the daughter of Amanda Burden, whose mother was Babe Paley, a well-known celebrity society icon. Amanda Burden’s long-time stepfather was William S. Paley, the founder of CBS. Amanda Burden was highly successful in her own right, serving as New York City Planning Commissioner and chair of the City Planning Commission under Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Belle’s father, Carter Burden, was a Vanderbilt descendant, who served on the New York City Council in the 1970s, and was the principal owner/publisher of The Village Voice.
The book is an expansion of Burden’s piece about the end of her marriage “Was I Married to a Stranger?” published in the Modern Love section of The New York Times in 2023. I remember reading the piece when it came out – it is beautifully and thoughtfully written.
Of course, as a prenup lawyer and mediator, I was attracted to the book to find out about her prenuptial agreement. What was the process, what might have been the flaws in it, and how did it affect the marriage and its aftermath? Could the prenup have led to the breakup? There is a seemingly pernicious amendment that Burden signed against her lawyer’s advice that was presented two weeks before the wedding that changed the entire nature of the financial relationship between her and her husband, whom she calls “James” in the book.
And I’ll not opine here about what it was that caused her seemingly loving husband to leave the marriage (and their three teenage children) so inexplicably and suddenly at the beginning of the COVID epidemic, and whether the prenup she signed was fair or not.
Burden says this about the prenup and her thoughts at the time she signed it, which she viewed for the first time in twenty years, as the divorce process was playing out.
As Burden scrolled down to the signing page, she says, “I stopped at the sight of my own name. My signature looked innocent and hopeful, in blue ink and careful script, dated five days before our wedding.” Later, not thinking of the adverse financial implications flowing from the prenuptial agreement she had signed, upon purchase of the New York coop and the Martha’s Vineyard home funded by her separate property, Belle made sure the properties were titled in joint names. She believed, wholeheartedly, in the strength and longevity of the marriage. And until the day her husband left, she thought the marriage was strong and loving.
People getting married – even with a prenup – tend to have “optimism bias.” Optimism bias is the tendency to believe that bad outcomes are less likely to happen to you than to other people, even when you know those outcomes may be common.
Optimism bias causes people to sign prenups that could have very negative results for them when (not if) the prenup actually comes into effect, which it always does, at divorce or the death of one of the spouses. For instance, there might be a divorce after career sacrifice, or a drastic change in financial position of either spouse. The person signing will think, “That won’t happen to me.” They cannot imagine needing the protections they are giving up.
Journalist Jennifer Wilson discusses optimism bias in her piece “Why Millennials Love Prenups” published in The New Yorker on December 22, 2025.
Wilson says the problem is that people negotiating prenups may understand, abstractly, that many marriages end in divorce, but still believe their own marriage will not end in divorce. Another way to look at it, according to Brian Bix in his 1998 article, “Bargaining in the Shadow of Love: The Enforcement of Premarital Agreements and How We Think about Marriage” in Jennifer Wilson’s New Yorker article, is that a person’s “earlier self” may not be able to judge fairly what their “later self” will need after a marriage has changed or failed.
So, in practical terms, prenups are often negotiated under a psychological disability: people in love may not be good predictors of their own future vulnerability. They suffer from optimism bias.
Many commentators have discussed the pros and cons of the terms of Burden’s prenup, and whether it was fair to each of the parties. My take on it, even if it was fair and equitable based on the underlying financial circumstances of Belle and “James” (the nom de plume given in the book to her husband), it was the lack of clarity and transparency about discussing it between the parties during the marriage that may have caused a fatal a weakness in the structure of the marriage that led to divorce. Apparently, “James” thought intently about the money terms of the prenup during the marriage and financially planned accordingly; Belle did not.
Now to the two topics in “Strangers” that stuck me the most – the loving and supportive relationship between Belle and her stepmother, Susan, and Belle’s loss of her self- confidence in her own capabilities when she was a young woman, which happens so frequently. In Belle’s case, it flowed from one comment made by a male student in her freshman writing seminar, quite the irony, since she has now penned a beautifully written best-seller.
Susan.
Susan, Belle’s stepmother, met Belle’s father, Carter Burden, shortly after his divorce from Belle’s mother in 1972, when Belle was just 3 years old and her brother, 5. Susan was just 23 at the time. Susan and Belle’s father married five years later, in 1977.
During their early childhood, Belle and her brother spent much of their time at her father and Susan’s “very warm” home. They were very clearly in a child/parent relationship with Susan as a mother. A lovely (and telling) factoid in the book is that when her father and Susan went on their honeymoon to St. Martin in 1977, they took Belle and her brother with them.
As Belle says, “My brother and I loved Susan immediately. She was young and fun and gathered us up, spending hours with us.” The weekends her father had custody, Sue picked Belle up at school on Friday and took her out for a sandwich wrapped in white paper from a deli on Madison Avenue.
Belle describes her father’s and Susan’s marriage as an example of a great marriage — to her, they were the perfect couple. However, her father died suddenly at age 54 of a heart attack when Belle was 26. Belle came to the apartment as soon as she learned of her father’s death. Her father was still there where Susan had found him, lying on the bed. “I found Susan in the kitchen. We held each other, crying. My brother put his arms around us.” This was clearly more than a usual stepparent relationship. Susan, by then a family therapist, helped Belle through a difficult process of grieving, even as Susan was going through her own loss.
The stepparent relationship as experienced by Belle and Susan was and is (Susan remains alive) remarkably unusual, loving and strong. Unfortunately, in the context of divorce, it is all too rare. Susan treated and perceived Belle and her brother as her own children, with love and care throughout Burden’s life’s difficulties. As Burden writes, “Growing up, I had three parents who loved me.” She was lucky. She did have three parents – her mother, father, and Susan. And Susan and Belle have maintained a loving and strong bond during the 30 years since her father’s death in 1996.
There are many examples of Susan’s parental connection in the book. Among them are these: Susan bought an eight-acre plot of land adjacent to the Martha’s Vineyard house, to help Belle and her husband secure their privacy and so that their children could build houses on it as adults. Susan came to visit Belle and her family every year for Susan’s birthday. When Belle closed the Vineyard house at the beginning of COVID epidemic after the breakup, Susan stayed with the girls at the NYC apartment.
The abrupt breakdown of the marriage left Belle in a severe, debilitating depression.
Susan insisted that Belle find a therapist and found a suitable psychiatrist, who made room for Belle in her busy schedule. The psychiatrist gave Belle a reality check, saying it was wrong to leave a marriage with no warning and no explanation.
During the worst bouts of Belle’s grief over the end of her marriage, Susan was quarantining from COVID at Belle’s cousin’s house in the Hamptons with one of Belle’s three children, her son Finn. Belle writes that she slept “in Susan’s king-size bed, …the only available spot. She brought me tea and put her cool hand on my forehead, as she had when I was a child. She reports Susan saying “I don’t know how you are in one piece” and she responds, “I’m not sure I am.”
As a skilled family therapist (it’s good to have one in every family!), Susan helped Belle to navigate the snubs in her social life resulting from the breakup. The Martha’s Vineyard club had been an important social contact for Belle, her husband and children. When she returned without James, she had encountered some members’ negative reaction to her. Some men who she knew well, would turn away from her as she approached. A woman friend told her that her husband, not Belle, should remain a member of the club. Burden so rightly says to her friend, “I don’t understand. He’s in New York. He’s having an affair. I’m here with the kids. Why wouldn’t it be me?”
Susan urged Belle to look at these rebuffs and slights generously. “Maybe they were proving their loyalty to their spouses by not speaking to a newly single woman? Or they had an unconscious fear of contagion, one divorce leading to another? Or most likely, they just didn’t know what to say?” These are the words of a skilled therapist, helping a suffering person to reframe.
Susan urged Belle to try to reframe some of the rebuffs with a different, more kindly, interpretation. “Maybe she was speaking about her own experience, her own family’s experience with a difficult divorce. Maybe Belle’s story brought up her complicated feelings about it. She felt it was important to defend the person who was absent, whose reputation was being trampled, to remind everyone, including Belle, of James’s humanity.”
Burden thought about leaving the club, but as she says, “The possibility that I could be rejected because of Jame’s rejection of me did not seem survivable.” Then she had the competing feeling – there was “another voice in my head saying, They expect you to disappear. And if you disappear from here, you might disappear completely.”
Eventually, Belle climbs out of the sadness and depression – through therapy, Susan’s support and through writing. (More about that later.)
Greg.
This brings us to the second major topic (for me) in the book – the way very early on, Burden’s faith in herself and her capabilities were lessened. She started internalizing low self-worth and persistent negative self-criticism. Women frequently struggle with this issue, often arising in late teen-age years. It is a social malady common among women; it’s really an epidemic.
Belle was an excellent writer in high school at Phillips Exeter Academy, winning several prizes for fiction. On that basis, she was admitted to a selective writing seminar for upper classmen in her freshman year at Harvard – one of only two freshmen in the class. She read her first short story in October of that year to the class.
What she remembers is a that senior named Greg told her it was terrible, and that she couldn’t write. “The teacher, another man, said nothing. After a few minutes of silence, a female student rose to her defense. It was too late.” She took Greg’s assessment as the truth and this one public humiliation changed the trajectory of her entire life. She backed off, and changed her focus away from writing, eventually becoming a lawyer, attending New York University law school, and working at a large law firm. From that point on, she only wrote legal briefs.
Her first law firm job at Davis Polk was in the litigation group handling tobacco company defense. She wanted to change her assignment to a team that handled something that would align better with her values. She could have asked to be assigned to a new case within that litigation department, but “it felt easier, less confrontation, to just switch departments.”
She was also non-confrontational in her past romantic relationships. “When the relationship had run its course, I was always too afraid to break it off. The prospect of hurting someone’s feelings paralyzed me.”
After her three children were born, she never went back to paid work. (It’s hard to work full-time when you have three children!) She felt increasingly unskilled as a lawyer and had a glaring gap in her resume. She sometimes “felt like the worst kind of fraud; I was neither working nor a proper stay-at-home mother, since I had help with childcare and housework.”
A friend (male) offered her a job at a large foundation he’d just been hired to run. “He believed in my competence, even while I didn’t, and my skills seem to be a fit. I was torn, but James was clear.” He said, “You can’t do that. You need to be here for the kids.” I had hoped he would encourage me to accept the job, that he would say, “Don’t worry. We will figure it out. I will help.”
Burden paid the family bills online and signed the tax returns, but she didn’t look at the returns or the family finances carefully. She depended on her husband to navigate that portion of their marriage. She was afraid she wouldn’t understand it, “even though I was a former corporate lawyer.”
Belle joined a writing group. It was the first time she’d written anything (other than legal briefs) in thirty-five years, ever since Greg told her in front of that class that she couldn’t write. She was fifty-three years old. Her piece eventually turned into her essay “Was I Married to a Stranger?” in the New York Times’Modern Lovesection.
Both Belle’s mother and Susan loved the piece and were pleased with the positive effect it had on Belle and her sense of her own capabilities. Belle felt that her return to writing was returning to something she loved, and the opening of something new and validating.
The Modern Love editor wanted to publish it but insisted that Belle show it to James prior to publication. That almost derailed the process. She wrote to the editor: “It seems like such a rule would silence many women writing about their own experience of an event.” As Belle says, she didn’t recognize this version of herself – a woman challenging a respected male editor.
Eventually she did show it to James, and he was supportive saying “Your article is good, sad, hard to read, I’m supportive.”
After it was published, there was a wellspring of support. Two editors at big publishing houses reached out to say how good it was. As Burden comments, “Their approval, as arbiters of good writing, shook me.” She thought, “Maybe Greg was wrong?”
As the emails poured in, Burden felt “steadier” in her decision to go public. “I had made other people feel seen and acknowledged, and they had done the same for me.”
There also were many negative reactions after the Modern Love piece went public. The hurt consumed her again. She had, as she says, “the sinking feeling that I would be alienated, judged, excluded. It felt so familiar, a particular pain that highlighted … all that was wrong with me.”
And then realizing the irony of the obvious, she could see that “… many of my detractors had said nothing to me about James leaving. To them, a woman writing about a man leaving is, somehow, worse than the man leaving.”
In Burden’s acknowledgments at the end of the book, she writes, “My stepmother, Susan Burden, has been with me from the first phone call to the final draft, and every moment in between. I thank my lucky stars that she agreed to go out with my father fifty-two years ago. This is her book, too.”
Yes, it’s Susan’s book, too. And Greg’s. And most importantly, Belle’s.
Laurie Israel © 2026. All rights reserved.