Belle Burden sat down with Oprah Winfrey this year for an episode of The Oprah Podcast titled “Oprah with Belle Burden on the Collapse of Her 20 Year Marriage & Her Bestselling Memoir”. Winfrey opened the conversation by describing Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage, as a book that “has struck a chord with so many women and readers,” adding, “Everybody I know is talking about this book.”
Winfrey introduced Belle Burden as a Harvard-trained lawyer whose maternal grandmother was the style icon and socialite Babe Paley. Burden, Winfrey said, came from a family “where generations of women rarely ever discussed their husband’s transgressions,” and had broken with that pattern first in a Modern Love essay and then in the book that followed.
Burden told Winfrey she had not anticipated the scale of the response to either. “I thought when I wrote it that it would be a quiet book, that it would sort of get known by word of mouth and women would talk about it a little bit, but I did not expect this kind of response,” she said. She had first written about the end of her marriage in the Modern Love essay “Was I Married to a Stranger?” in The New York Times, and described a similar impulse behind the book that followed. “I wanted to do this book because there are so many friends that I’ve had who’ve gone through this and I feel like I’ve gone through it with them,” she said.
Vulnerability at the Center of the Conversation
Much of the conversation returned to the shame Burden said she carried after her husband, whom she calls James in the book, a pseudonym, ended their marriage. Winfrey read aloud a passage from page 145: “I felt a deep sense of embarrassment about it. James was the one who had an affair, who walked out, but the shame had become mine. I had made it mine. I was an abandoned wife, a woman rejected by her husband, a woman who had failed to keep her family together.” Burden said that feeling followed her back into her own community. “I felt like I was less than all these other women who had stayed married,” she told Winfrey.
Truth-Telling as the Throughline
Burden also described the moment she decided against calling the separation amicable, which her husband had asked her to do. “I felt this full-bodied certainty that I could not do that, that I could not lie about it, that I would not survive this if I tried to lie about it,” she said. That decision, she told Winfrey, shaped both the original essay and the book that followed. “I have always felt like being open and honest about this was my path forward,” she said. “There was just going to be no other path than open honesty, and doing it in a way that was not vindictive.”
A Family Conversation, in Public
The episode also included an appearance by Belle Burden’s mother, Amanda Burden, who joined partway through the conversation. Amanda Burden described her daughter’s decision to write the book as an act of courage. “She was so courageous and brave and took on a very formidable subject, which is really about male entitlement,” she said. She added that the book had reached readers beyond her daughter’s own experience. “I really believe Belle has helped many, many women,” she said, “because they can identify this and because they feel less alone, and that is really, really important.”
Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage debuted at #1 on the New York Times bestseller list. The full conversation is available to watch on YouTube, and Strangers can be found in print or as an audiobook narrated by Burden herself on Audible.
