Oprah with Belle Burden on the Collapse of Her 20 Year Marriage & Her Bestselling Memoir

I see that you've marked the book out by her.

“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. Yes. You are everyone that you have written the manual for every woman. This is the, this is book is just, it's a memoir of marriage, but it's also a memoir

of every woman who's gone through divorce, suddenly hearing from her husband, I don't want to be there anymore. I'm unhappy and you thought everything was okay, and he, yep, this is the book. Thank you. Urbized.

Urbized talk about that. You're gonna get it too. Okay. I'm ready. Okay.

Ask me anything. Okay. Hey there, everybody. Welcome to the Oprah Podcast. It's good to be with you here.

I'm really excited to talk about our subject today. Take a moment and try to imagine this happening to you. A lot of you don't even have to imagine it because it's already happened. Out of the blue, your spouse of 20 years and father to your three children says this. I thought I was happy, but I'm not.

I thought I wanted our life, but I don't. I feel like a switch has been flipped. I'm done. You can have custody of the kids. I don't want it. I don't want any of it.

Imagine that after 20 years. When you're just thinking things are okay, well, my guest heard just those words from her husband and has now written an evocative, may I say book that has struck a chord with so many women and readers. Everybody I know is talking about this book.

It calls strangers a memoir of marriage, but if you've been through divorce or suspected you might be going through a divorce, it's also your story. From the outside, Bellburden was living a life, most people only dream of. She and her husband of 21 years were raising their three children in New York City. Summers were spent at their home on Martha's Vineyard, an idyllic island off the coast

of Massachusetts. Bell, a Harvard-trained lawyer, hails from a prominent American family, filled with bold

face names including the Vanderbiltz and John Jay, the first chief justice of the Supreme

Court. Her maternal grandmother was style icon and socialite, Bay Paley. Her step-grandfather was Bill Paley, the founder of CBS. Bell grew up in a family where generation to women rarely ever discussed their husband's questions, but when her own husband abruptly ended their marriage, Bell decided to break

that chain. First, with a modern love essay in the New York Times that went viral, and now, with her new New York Times best-sellers, strangers, a memoir of marriage. Welcome, Bell, Burton, glad to be with you on my front porch. I'm so glad to be here.

Oh, the people are talking about this book. They really are, I'm hearing from so many women around the world, and it's really surprised me and the most wonderful way. OK, what did you think when you wrote it? I know it started as an article for the New York Times.

It did, and 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. But it really is women reading it and saying something to other women, it's exactly. Exactly.

“Some books explain things, I would say, and then there are books that name things that I think”

that we've been living with our whole lives, but never had the language for you all know

what I'm talking about. And strangers is actually one of those books. So you're married for 21 years to James, that's not his real name. You believe that it was a good marriage, a solid and happy marriage, and you're in your husband had recently, this is what struck me about the book, you're in your husband had

recently purchased a brand new expensive, sleek number mattress. Yes, very, very expensive bed, January, and this happened in March two months later, and he had picked out the mattress. OK, so you're thinking if you're getting this expensive mattress, that it's at least, you know, 10 years, maybe?

Yeah. And so the sleep mattress allows you to just, you all may have one of these, it allows you to adjust your firmness and softness for each side. Yes, yeah. It's something about that mattress that stood out for me.

Have other people mentioned that, too?

“A couple of people have mentioned it, and I think about it a lot, because it was such an”

investment, and it was so accommodating of both of our tastes, he likes a very soft mattress. I like a very hard mattress. You're too hard, man. And it seemed like this great compromise, it also took a lot to get it into the frame.

a big ordeal. And so it's one of those things I look at and think he could not have been planning this. Yeah.

“And I think what is so interesting about that is everybody that I know who's gone through”

it, particularly people who are betrayed and find out that their spouse has been cheating, they go back through everything and you think where was the sign, when should I have known what was the clue? And if you bought that expensive mattress in January, that is a clue that we're moving in the right direction and that we're, you know, stable.

stable. Happy, even. And I have tried to look back and look for those red flags. Either a red flag about him, his character, or a sign that he was really moving away and planning to, to leave, and it's hard to find those.

And then you get the call on March 21st, 2020. So let me remind everybody, I don't have to tell you, March 21st, 2020, we had just gotten the word, I think, around March 16th that we're going to be in lockdown.

So that's a Saturday after our first full week in lockdown during COVID, set the scene for

us. I appreciate the way you do it in the book. I can see your one daughter, she's upstairs playing Fortnite. And then your other daughter has made dinner, and you're in the kitchen, and what happens. So we had just finished dinner, I was cleaning up, I was actually mopping the floor, and

I got a call on my cell phone. I don't recognize the number, so I let it go to voicemail. And then I play the message, and it's a man's voice. He sounds nervous, and he says, I'm trying to reach bowel, I'm sorry to tell you this, but your husband is having an affair with my wife.

And my first voice message, this is a voice message. And my first thought is, this can't be true, this must be a mistake, it's a wrong number. And then I realized, the wrong bowel, I realized he said my name.

“And I think, he must, my husband's going to explain this, we're very happily married.”

We love each other.

I've never seen any sign of this, how can this be true?

And we'd had this week that was, we were all scared about the pandemic, but it was very cozy, he was chopping wood and making fires and bringing me cocktails, and it was all very cozy. And that night, he admitted to the affair, but he told me that it didn't mean anything. It had only been going on for a couple of weeks, and that he loved me, and only me, and loved

our family. And I thought, okay, I'm stuck in this house, we are going to have to do therapy on Zoom. I'm going to have to figure out if I can work through this, it's going to be a nightmare, but this is what we're going to have to do. So your immediate response after your husband says to you, listen, it's only been going

on for for two weeks, he said, and you think, okay, we're going to work through it. We're going to work through it. I asked some questions, I asked for her name, I asked if she had kids, he gave me those details, and then my younger daughter called for me, and we had to end that conversation. And I went to my shower and closed the door, the glass door to my shower, and just started

wailing, and didn't in a place where my girls could not hear me. And I texted the man who would call me, it wasn't quite ready to talk to him on the phone,

“and I said, can you tell me how long this has been going on?”

And he said, I think about a month, so a little bit different. And then he said, but I can't talk now because my wife is in an ambulance, and she has tried to kill herself. This is the girlfriend. The girlfriend.

Yes. His wife, my husband's mistress. Yes.

And I felt such worry then for this woman I'd never met, and I went to find my husband.

Well, you're different kind of woman, you're not that worried about the other woman. I just thought, you know, she's stressed, she's okay, and I went to find my husband. He was in our guest room, and he was on the phone with her. And he was almost hunched over the phone in this very caretaking pose. And I remember thinking, he's caretaking of her and not of me, and he's just, I've just

learned that our marriage is in crisis, and he's had an affair. Oh, you realize he's on the phone with her. And that he looks concerned and caretaking about her, and it was such a cold feeling, thinking that he was worried about her, and he told me she's going to be fine. She took some sleeping pills, she's going to be okay.

And then a few hours past, he went to sleep, I stayed in my room in torment.

Well, let me just read this one. I love this part where you say, you write that she had taken the pills.

The moment I James White first heard about her, wasn't I the one, is what you say.

Wasn't I the one who was supposed to be falling apart, wasn't he supposed to be worried about me? Exactly. She captured on husband's attention at a time when I needed it most. Yes.

What did you realize about your marriage in that moment? I wasn't quite able to put my head around it, I knew that everything had changed. Even in that moment, and then it changed a lot more later, but I just thought, wait, something is really wrong with this picture, and something is really wrong with both of them, actually. Because I'm the one who's gotten this devastating news, yet no one is concerned about

me. Well, that is the moment when reading strangers that I realize, oh, this is going to relate to so many women, because I lived through this with Gale, you all know Gale's been my best friend for 50 years now, and I can share this because she's talked about it herself, but on the night that she discovered her husband, with another woman in her house, in her

“bed, which is about the worst thing, I think that's one of the worst.”

Yep, that night that she discovered that I said to her, you got to pick your head up off the floor, and the moment that you talk about him being on the phone with the woman who's with his mistress, I remember Gale call me, and she said, I just found him with this woman, and I said, well, where is he now, and she said, he's gone to take her to the train station.

Yep, there you go. And us, girl, this is very telling. You don't even know how bad this is, this is really bad. It's a very bad sign. Yep, where he is supporting her, you are walking on him, you find him to make it, and

he then leaves to take her instead of consoling you. Yep, you're already out of the picture, they're already a mile ahead of you, that's how it felt. Yeah. And I should have known that night that this was not going to get better, and in fact,

it did get a lot worse. I thank you for listening to the Oprah podcast. When we come back, Bell shares how things became even more difficult for her and her children after finding out about her husband's affair. Hello, and welcome back to the Oprah podcast.

I'm talking with Bell Burton about her New York Times bestseller strangers, a memoir of a marriage.

“I think it's a must read, especially if you're married, ever been married, thinking about”

marrying. Let's get back to our conversation.

Okay, so that first night lying in bed, after you find him on the phone with her, you

feel a little different. Your concern changes, you're not like, oh, I'm so worried about her. You're like, well, actually, a little bit just shocked that she wasn't, she wasn't worried about me either. She kind of stole the attention in a way when I really deserved that attention.

Yeah. Yeah. And that moment. Yes, yes. And that was, obviously, she turned out to be okay.

She was fine. Once I knew she was fine, that's when it shifted to just astonishment. Yeah. That she still would be attention. Yes.

Yes. That's how it felt. I didn't sleep that night, he did, but at six in the morning, he came into my room, fully dressed with a tote bag packed, and his whole affect had changed. It was very cold.

His eyes were very icy, and he said to me, I've decided I want a divorce. I thought I was happy, but I'm not, and I'm going to leave right now. And he did, he walked out of our house, he got in his Jeep, he got on a ferry, and he left the island. And you were on Martha's Vineyard?

Yes. Okay. On Martha's Vineyard. Exactly. And he went to New York.

“I believe, to see her, and it was that moment that he became someone I really did not”

recognize. Therefore, the book Stranger's. Yes. Stranger's. He became a stranger.

Literally.

Because the man you had known would never have done that to you.

The man that I thought I knew would never have done that to me. I really, I thought he was a very devoted, mild, kind person, and he had never told me once that he was unhappy. Okay. A lot of times people don't say they're unhappy, but you sense the unhappiness.

You would never sense the unhappiness, or disconnection. Because when I first started reading, this book I thought it was going to be about, oh, you thought you were connected, but you recognized all the signs of being disconnected, and you were strained. You had always been strangers all along, but it wasn't that at all.

It didn't feel that way. I felt a real intimacy with him. Yeah. I did accept a little bit of remove. He was a little bit removed, a little bit distant, but I felt like that was a quirk in

And I guess there was more bubbling beneath the surface, maybe?

Yes, yes. Yes. But it was not a situation of realizing, oh, my gosh, he's been leading a stubble life all along. And I know those of you who are listening, who have been through this, and I know this

is a big club, a lot of members in this club, women who have been betrayed. You're going over in your head, all the things, all the signs, you could have, where could I've seen the sign, what did I miss, and one night you became convinced that James had

“fathered the other woman's toddlers, because he told you that she had toddlers, right?”

Yes, okay. Toddlers, about three and one year old. Yeah. And when you confronted him, he said what? Well, at that point, he had stopped answering my phone calls and told me that I was too

upset for him to speak to, but I caught him in the middle of the night. He picked up the phone and about one I am, because I was spiraling thinking that he had actually fathered them. And he said, stop, you have lost your mind, any hung up the phone. But that seemed, in this world where everything that I thought was impossible was now possible,

I thought, even that could be possible. Yeah. That it hasn't been two weeks or a month that you're now the father of toddlers. And a logical thought for somebody. It happens.

Yes. It happens all the time. But I felt like I had lost my mind, like his exit had transformed me suddenly from an intelligent, stable wife and mother to an unhinged lunatic, a mad woman. Somehow I had become the dangerous person in the story, the volatile character, rather

than he, the man who had left his family. Mm-hmm. Yeah. It's amazing to me.

“And I think this happens to a lot of women overnight.”

Somehow we are transformed into the hysteric. But I do think that based on all the people I know who've gone through this, that, that, that's a tactic. Yes, I think it is. It's a tactic that the men use.

Absolutely. In many instances, I realized where I'm laughing, because I remember it goes, "Oh, I'm not crazy." Exactly. Yes.

In many instances where the man, the husband, the spouse, is saying, you're crazy hysterical. I think there was a wonderful line that you wrote where you said once a woman is painted as a hysteric. The rest of the story is washed away. She's dismissed.

Yes. She's washed away dismissed. And it happens very quickly, even though he did something that was fairly unhinged to walk out on your family. Yes.

Yes. Within 12 hours, I was two upset. I was two angry. You're overreacting. You're overreacting.

You're hysterical. And everything. Actually, everything is fine. Oh, he kept saying everything's fine. This is fine.

So let's go to everything is fine. So how long before you all told the girls? Because this is what is so unbelievable.

I'm always amazed at working mothers, working parents who have a whole life outside and

then have to come home and be present for their children and not be hysterical for their children. So you didn't tell the girls at first? I didn't. A therapist advised that I wait because of the pandemic was so scary.

So that we should wait until the pandemic was less scary. And of course, that never happened. Right. And I thought I was hiding it from them. I did not do a good job.

I was crying all the time. I had trouble getting out of bed for a very long time. And what are you telling them is the reason for that? I just pretended like I was okay, even though my eyes were swollen. My older daughter actually knew she read a text on my iPad almost immediately, which happens

a lot, I think. And she knew and she had to pretend that she didn't know. And then my younger daughter didn't know, but then I think after-- The old was your older daughter at the time. 15.

Yes. And then my younger one was 12. And I also have a 17-year-old boy who was with his friends. And the younger one did not know, but then when she found out afterwards, she felt betrayed that I hadn't told her.

So I think that was in the stake. I wish I had told them. I said their dad had gone back to New York to go to work, even though New York was shut down. I just said, this is happening and told it in a factual way, so we could all go through

it together.

“I think you need to give yourself a day, though.”

It's true. You have to collect yourself, and I-- Yeah. As I say, many years ago, in the '70s, I interviewed Betty Rollins, who wrote a book called

First You Cry, was one of the first books about breast cancer, First You Cry.

And I'm ever saying to Gale that somebody should write a book for women going through a divorce that says, first, you pick your head up off the floor. Yes. Because you're so literally every person that I know has been through it who finds himself in the midst of betrayal for the first time, it's like you're chicken with your head caught

off. And I-- it's-- it's-- it's disconcerting, really, to--

And I've been in a lot of time on the bathroom floor, which you think is a cliche,

but it's actually not.

“I think we spend a lot of time there, because no one will come in.”

The room. And also it's like this cold floor that it made me feel like I wasn't going to fall through. Right. It holds you up.

It holds you up. Yeah. Okay. And a lot of tears. So how long before he comes back to tell the children?

It was a month. Yeah. I thought, we've got to tell them. This is crazy. We've got to tell them.

And initially, he didn't want to come. He wanted me to tell them. And didn't he want to zoom? Then we were going to zoom. Oh, crazy.

And I felt mixed about him coming, because he was in New York. I was worried he would bring COVID. I didn't know what kind of person was going to show up, because we had not been in. We had not been communicating.

But finally decided he should be there in person to tell the girls.

And we called my son beforehand. And then he arrived. And my first thought when I saw him coming up our walkway was that he seemed really happy. He seemed elated, which was so incongruous to the wreckage that he had left with me. Yeah.

And he came in and we sat in our living room. I had my arms around both girls. And he told them that we were enforcing, that he hadn't been happy. And it's just that terrible moment. It's terrible for any family when this news is delivered.

“But here's the thing that you're leaving out, Belle, discussed about the past.”

It's not this is a good part. He's telling the girls. And in the midst of telling girls, he says, can you get me a sandwich? He did. He looked at me and he said, oh, I can see you know, starving.

Yeah. Can you make me a sandwich? And part of my brain thought, you part of my brain goes home, yes, yes. Part of my brain thought, you still live here. Go make your own sandwich.

I'm going to make you a sandwich. And then I had my younger daughter run down the stairs. She's very upset. And my older daughter is sitting there with her arms crossed looking at her father. And I'm having a dialogue with myself that I think a lot of mothers have, which is, I

should model that we are going to be kind to each other, that we're going to work together, that we're not going to be nasty ever, that there will be loving caring here even if we're divorcing. So you made this inside one out. And I went into the kitchen and I made the sandwich.

And as I'm making it, I think I am going to make the best sandwich ever. I will not make a terrible sandwich. I want him to leave thinking, how could I leave this woman who makes such a great sandwich sandwich? And of course, the sandwich represented so much else to represent at home.

And the warrant is a thing that I'd like to hear right for you. Yes. What you received here exactly, but I don't think he saw it that way at all. I think he ate it and didn't think about it again. Yeah.

One of the things you write in strangers is that some people say the end of a marriage is 50/50, always 50/50. But you ask, is it 50/50 when the unhappy person doesn't say that they are unhappy? Is it 50/50 when you didn't know that there was this disruption going on? And I want to, does it matter in the end?

Does it, whether it was 50/50 or 20/80? I think it's one of those things that if it happens like this to you, it's frustrating when people say, oh, well, it takes two to tango, two people have to end a marriage. And I don't think that's fair. Because I think that you need, at least to be to be able to...

That's not so bad. You spend through it. No, that doesn't mean that. And in some cases it is, because there's conflict and there are a lot of issues, but you have to communicate that you're unhappy.

“You have to give someone a chance to go to therapy or discuss or something like that.”

So I resisted and I still resist that idea that it was 50/50. After a quick break, Belle Burton talks about the shame she carried after her divorce, and that one nagging whisper during her 21-year marriage that she wished she had paid attention to. Hi there and welcome back to my conversation with Belle Burton, whose New York Times best

seller strangers, a memoir of a marriage, is resonating with so many women, especially anyone who has experienced divorce. Did you go through the five stages of grief or the stages of grief, shock, denial, anger, bargaining, all of that? I think I did.

I would say that definitely shock, disbelief, anger was never the dominant emotion.

And I certainly felt it at times. I think I was so overwhelmed by sadness and shock, that anger came in spurts, but it was not the dominant thing. I wrestled with it later again, and then I think there was bargaining probably was there,

I ended there. Well, I've learned through all of my conversations over all these years, that acceptance

“is the key to everything, I mean, whether it's diagnosis for disease, whether it's a breakup”

of a relationship, if it's a job, getting to acceptance as soon as you can is what changes with trajectory for everything. I really agree, I really agree, and I had to get there on my own, because I thought I could

land on an answer, and that that was key to being able to accept this, and I never got

that answer. I didn't get it from him, I didn't get it from my detective work, I just never got it, and what shifted it for me. That's why this book is, you all are going to love this book, if you haven't read it already, it's so important, is because every woman wants the answer to why.

Yes. Why? Why did this happen? Why did I do something wrong? I went to all of those lines.

You couldn't get to the why. I couldn't get to it, and I worried, actually, that readers would be frustrated that I never

“get to it, but I think what happened for me.”

I think it's on the other one.

The reason why the book is so popular is that you didn't get to it, and so many women haven't gotten to it. Exactly, and that's right. And what changed it for me is shifting the focus, because I wasn't going to, it was like trying to get blood from a stone, I wasn't going to get it from him.

So I had to shift the focus to myself. My stepmother's a family therapist, and she uses this trick where you picture him and myself on a stage, and the spotlight's on him, and I have to move it in my brain from him to me. That's really important.

And I just wanted to say, as I was reading, and I was thinking, you did this as a memoir, originally as an article, and then now a book, but you did a memoir about your life, and going through analyzing what had happened in your marriage. But it becomes sort of a manual, I think, for other women who are going through it.

First of all, you mentioned your stepmother.

I, in the book, I remember when she tells you that divorce is worse than death, and at first you didn't seem to agree, did you come to realize differently, or think differently about that divorce is worse than death? I know a lot of you who are going through it have been through it, filled that way.

“Yes, I think it's hard for me to say that, because I watched her lose my father, and how”

horrible that was to be a widow. And she's a therapist. Yes. And she told me. And she believes that it's worse because he is out there living a different life, and

I had to really look back at our love story and re-evaluated and feel that rejection, which is so painful. But my children still have a father, and a lot of, you know, when there's death, people lose important people to them. I understand that, and I know a lot of people are going to challenge it, but what I think

she meant, and I have said that to my friends too, this is worse than death, because if your husband had died, you come to accept that he is dead, and nothing's going to change, and you couldn't have changed that. Yes, and your narrative can stay the same. And your narrative can stay the same.

If your husband betrays you, suddenly leaves you, you're still left with all the wise and the wise and the wise and the wise. And a lot of shame. And a lot of shame. A lot of shame.

Tell us why you were feeling shame when you're not the one who walked out on your family. I felt it so intensely. I really felt so much shame as I re-enter the community that I'm a part of there. I felt like I had failed and keeping my husband interested in me, loving me, I had failed and keeping my family intact.

I felt like I was less than all these other women who had stayed married. I think for me, there are so many people who have been through this, but when you're going through it, you're not aware of that. You feel like you're the only person this has happened to, and you feel so isolated. Page 145, you write, "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. It would be the outsider, I think, a lot of women, particularly in your social circles think

this, I would be the outsider among all the married people, all the intact families, all the women, all the women who were wanted by their husband. Yes. It was so deeply hard for me, and I happened to be in a community where everyone was married. I felt like the only person who was not married, and so you kind of cross over from one

day to the next, from being a part of something, to being different, to not being a part of that thing. Your ex-husband wanted you to tell everyone that the separation was mutual, but what

The story is that you didn't hide.

“You were embarrassed in all the things that we just said, but you didn't hide.”

You would go up to people in your social circle and say out loud. I would say my husband left me, I don't know why, and I am an agony. And the moment that he asked me for it to be, to say it was amicable, he tried to tell me it would be better for me. 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.

So when I ran into people, I just said it, and I never stopped saying it, and some people

could handle it, and some people could not. When did you make the decision to do that? The moment he said, I wanted to give you that. And that was only a weekend, and I just knew, I couldn't do it, which is contrary to my personality.

I'm shy, I'm very private, but I just knew I could not spin a false narrative about this. This was what was happening to me, what was happening to my kids. Okay, so everyone has their own social circles, and whether it's your school or your church or your community or your girls club, your book club, yours happens to be in Martha's vineyard. And nearly two years after your divorce, the New York Times published an essay was I married

to a stranger. Why did you want to write that article? Because of their modern love column. I was of the modern love column. About a year after he laughed when we were moving towards divorce, I felt like there

were so many different narratives about what had happened, including from him. Okay, okay, let's stop this for a second, I just want to ask you. So when you go up to someone and you say, when you make the decision, you're going to say, James has left me, and I don't know why, and I'm in agony, I'm sure people didn't know what the hell to do with that.

A lot of people did not, and I understand, I'm not sure I would have known what to do with it. I'm not sure I would. But the word it's written. Right? Oh, everyone was talking about it.

Because this was hot. You walk into a room and everyone is talking about it. And people, some people are uncomfortable with it. I had a couple of men that I knew well turned away from me and walk away from me without saying, "Hello."

And on the other hand, some people really move towards me, and it's taught me a lot about how to respond to someone who's going through anything. Anything that's a sudden change or a difficult thing. I had people stop me on the street and say, "I'm so sorry you're going through this," or another woman who, "Grabby by the shoulders," and said, "I'm going to take care of you."

And it was such a beautiful thing. It really lifted me up.

“But there were harder reactions too, and I think for all those people, people bring”

them their own family histories to these things, and their reaction is definitely influenced by that. When the article first came out, tell us about the reaction. I can't remember where you were. I was on Martha's Vineyard, it came out on June 30th, 2023, and I was so excited, because

I'd wanted to be a writer when I was a teenager, and when I started trying to write down exactly what happened, I got very interested in the art of it again, and when it was picked, I just thought, "Oh my God, this is incredible." So I felt this pride and excitement. And it really, some people were incredibly congratulatory and supportive, and for other people

it made them very uncomfortable that I was speaking about this and writing about it.

And for some, I think it made them, they were more critical of me writing about it than

of him leaving. Wow. Which really surprised me. Even it's using you being a bad mother. Yeah.

Which was really painful for me, because I put myself through that same question. Am I doing something harmful to my kids? By telling the truth. By telling the truth. By exposing the story, by exposing the story, by exposing the story about their father.

They knew everything in the story, they had lived the story, but there was this idea that

“you should never ever speak these stories out loud, because it harms your children by”

harming their father. And that is just not something we talk about. We keep private things private.

And I, from the beginning from the moment he asked me to say that it was amicable, I have always

felt like being open and honest about this was my path forward. There was just going to be no other path than open honesty and doing it in a way that was not vindictive.

have been betrayed by their husbands live in the space of being vindictive and they are so fulfilled with so much anger.

“That's why thought it was interesting that you said when you were going through the stages,”

anger wasn't one of the places that you landed. But so many women speak from a space of anger and revenge and being vindictive. But you never blame.

You're just always trying to analyze and trying to figure out what's happening.

Yes, I hope so. I, some people may not buy this because I wrote a book, but I had seen friends who had been through divorce and could not get themselves out of that place, even long after the divorce was over and it just infused their whole being and I just did not want the rest of my life. Being the angry divorce aid became their thing.

Yes, which may not be fair, but I just didn't want to be consumed with it. I didn't want to be consumed with what I got and didn't get and I didn't want to be consumed with the betrayal. So I decided that when we signed our divorce agreement, that I would, that would be the marker that I would not live in that place anymore.

And in the book, I really tried to, and in modern love to, not speak from that kind of

place to really speak factually about that.

So you started writing strangers because you were trying to figure out yourself, how did this happened to me? Yes, like all writers, I think I was writing to figure it out. And to really put things in place, in part of that actually was reconstructing our love

“story, our life is a family, my own family of origin and try to really look since I wasn't”

getting any answers from him, look at myself and look at the decisions I made over 20 years that kind of put me in the place that I was not in a place of blame. But just like, okay, so I made these decisions about finances, I made these decisions about career and here I am. And now what do I want it to look like going forward?

You, you, you, you just brought up finances. I wanted to say this.

I hear a lot of women, a lot of women, it made a similar mistake as you did allowing your

spouses to handle all the finances and you write on page 95 about I lost touch with both the big picture and the details of our financial life, depending on James to tell me what to do. I felt to machine about it about not being involved about not asking questions, but I was afraid I wouldn't understand it that it was too complicated for me, even though I was a former corporate lawyer, I settled into the vagueness, the luxury and privilege

of not knowing. What do you want to say to all the women doing that right now? If my book does one thing, if it makes women pay more attention to their finances and what's going on in their relationship or their marriage financially, I will be so happy because I think I'm not alone in what I did.

I handed it over to him in this very trusting, loving way. My father died two years before and I was looking for a safe harbor. He said to me, I'm going to take care of you and it honestly it felt romantic to me to hand it over to him. He was this man and a great flannel suit going off to work and this was how he was going

to take care of our family and as you lose touch with it, for me I convinced myself that he was better able to handle it, that oh gosh it actually was very complicated. He made it seem very complicated. It actually isn't. It's not hard to learn this stuff and what I would want, what I ask friends to do is

to read your tax returns, understand where your assets are, who's name is on each thing and have the conversation or have some understanding about what will happen if the relationship ends.

“Even if you're the most happily married person on earth, you should know what will happen”

to you if it ends. Okay. I often say that you're watching me over the years, if heard me say this, that life speaks to us in whispers. And you don't pay attention to the whispers, you get a little bump upside the head, you

don't pay attention to that, you get a brick, and then you get a brick wall. That pre-nup was whispering to you for months. Was it not? It was. It was.

The pre-nup was a big whisper that I carried with me for the 20 years. It was still whispering to me. It was a very standard pre-nup that my family wanted me to sign because I had some inherited money. Yeah, because you come from generations of women who move.

Yes. And my money was in trust, it was protected. We had a standard pre-nup that said, whatever you come into the marriage with remains yours,

is split. This is the pre-nup that my brother signed, it's very standard.

But my then fiancee said, first he was very offended by the pre-nup, and then he asked

two weeks before our wedding, that the pre-nup be changed to say that anything earned during the marriage would not be split, unless we affirmably chose to put it in joint name. And I trusted his logic, I wanted to please him, my lawyer, who was a great lawyer at a big New York firm, said, do not do this, this is not good for you. You want to be home with kids, he's going into finance, this is not smart, and I convinced

him using the arguments that my fiancee was giving to me, and we changed it. And I knew as he became welfare, and I depleted my assets and put them into joint name in the form of our house in our apartment. Lord, that this was not going to be good for me, but yet I did not act on it. I just kept trusting you.

You felt it, though. I felt it. I knew it was there, I knew it was there, and I felt it.

“That's what I'm saying, it was what you wanted.”

It was whispering, and there were other things that were whispering in that financial story that I should have paid attention to. There was, you know, he really wanted me to document all of my spending. He would not openly share how he was doing financially. So you didn't know what he was doing, but he knew what we were doing.

Exactly.

He always knew what I was doing, and I did not ask enough questions, and I think that it felt

like protection, but it also, I say this in the book, "The Flipside of Protection" is control. Yeah. Right? Where you're just not, you do not have agency.

And one of the great parts of my life now is having that financial agency, and not having anyone have any control over me in that way. When we return, what does Bell's ex-husband say about her version of their marriage? We're coming right back. You know, you're talking about the story, the story of this soul-flashback, just at some point, and then you're saying that it's stupid.

No, I'm not. This story is like my safe space. Do you think everything is possible? Yeah, exactly. This story is like the story of the story, which I just understood.

The story of the studio, the job, or the music. It's stupid. It doesn't mean I'm like the story of the story. The story of the story? It's safe.

With this story? Thanks for joining me on the upper partcast. I'm talking with Bell Burton about her powerful memoir Strangers. If you know someone who's experienced a painful separation or divorce, share the link to this episode. Here's more of our conversation.

Well, you come from generations of women who had experienced infidelity and divorce, including your mother. Yes. A man to burden. Grandmother, Bayley, those of you who may know who Bayley was. You write, I thought I had ended this legacy, by marrying someone so steady, so unassuming,

someone who didn't have a public presence, someone who didn't flirt with other women,

at least not in front of me, as he'd never showed you any signs.

None. I really thought, and I thought about it, I thought I'm picking someone so different. This is, I'm not going to make the mistakes my grandmother made. And my mother made. I'm going to learn from it, and I repeated it in a much more spectacular fashion, because

their mates actually wanted forgiveness and wanted to come back. Mine did not.

“Mine was just gone, and I really wondered, are we doing something to attract this?”

Are we looking for this? Why have I ended up in the same place as my mother and my grandmother? And my grandmother had died when I was nine, but she really was very present during this time. That was so dark for me.

It was like she was all around me, trying to help me through it, comfort you. Yes, and comfort me. Her spirit comes first. Yes. It felt that way.

Your mother is joining us. Welcome, Amanda. Welcome. Hi. Well, I'm so glad to be here with you, too, and we're having such a good conversation.

Both of you. That's a beautiful balcony.

“So what was your reaction when Bill told you she was going to write her story, Amanda?”

Well, when she decided to write the book, I was a little nervous because we are a family that is very quiet about private issues and private affairs. But I could see that Bill was in a lot of pain and that she saw a way forward by writing a book that would both help her and give her a way to deal with her very difficult situation.

your daughter or the fact that she actually wrote the book? I'm sure it was a surprise. Yeah. Well, it was not quite a surprise because Bill had been a great writer and she gave it up.

So this was a way to, for her, to kind of reclaim an essential part of herself.

And the surprises in the book were one that she was so courageous and brave and took on a very formidable subject, which is really about male and petal men. As I was saying to her here, it feels like it's a manual for women getting through it, even though she was just writing about herself because it is so pure, so honest, so piercing, it connects on a really deep level.

So you must be very proud at this point. I'm very proud and I think, you know, I've heard many people come up to me to talk about the book and I really believe, Bill has helped many, many women. Yeah, I think so. I say, can identify this and because they feel less alone.

And that is really, really important. And she's also given women a pathway to one self-examine and look at their situation without bitterness and move forward by focusing on their future one step at a time. Yeah, I think she actually did so accurately for herself. Take the spotlight off of him and put the spotlight on herself and her well-being.

“And that's why I think the book is going to be so helpful to so many people.”

I would agree with you on that. How did you feel when she was sharing with you about your mother, Bay Payley, who died when she was nine, being such a presence with her throughout this? What do you think your mom would have thought of Belle's decision to speak out in this moment?

Um, my mother was very attached to Belle when she was a little girl.

And it was very painful that she died when she always so young.

But my mother would have been completely over the mood about this mother. She would have been so proud of Belle and doing something that neither her mother or her grandmother could do. Wow. Well, thank you, Amanda, for joining us. Thank you.

It was great to spend time with you both. Thank you. My daughter. Bye. One of the things I like about the book is it's restraint, as I was saying, you

don't write from a place of blame, but from the very beginning you were shocked that your husband didn't want to, you know, that he seemed to want to give up his role as being an immediate father, not that he didn't continue to have a relationship with his children,

“but when he said, what he said to you, were you surprised?”

I was really surprised. He said at the first day, when he was leaving, when he was walking out the door, that he did not want past cities that I could have focused at, and I thought he would change his mind. And I'm a child of divorce, and I really believe in joint custody.

It's what I would have wanted. So I served up joint custody agreement, 50/50, and it came back blacklined with all of his time taken out. And his reason was that the children were older. He said they were fully formed human beings, and that he was a great dad, but he was

not, this was not going to be the next part of his life. He also thought it was better for them not to go back and forth. He didn't want them going back from household to household, but my youngest was 12. She really wanted a bedroom in his apartment, and that was really painful. Did he continue to engage with the children?

He's always been very kind and sweet with them.

He keeps in touch with them by text. They see each other for a dinner, for a hockey game, but he does not do the day-to-day parenting. The emotional stuff, the college applications, the Spanish test, that is not what he has done. His stuck to that commitment to not being that kind of parent.

Because I was saying earlier, the thing that's hardest to reconcile for so many people is that the thing that I thought you were, you weren't. Yes. And I remember when you all went back to New York, and you're going back to the apartment, and he met the girls there, and he sees you on the street, and he says everything was

great. Yes. So this is in May.

“We hadn't seen him since the sandwich, and I thought he walks by me on the street, I think”

we're going to have a conversation, something. So he's just seen the girls. He's just seen the girls, and the girls have had a really hard time, and he looks at

And again, I did not say anything back because I thought he's not going to give me anything,

but I did want to say, what are you talking about, nothing about this is fine. This is then an emotional trauma for our family.

“What do you think perhaps maybe the girls tried to let him think everything was fine?”

Maybe they may have tried to act that way, but I think he really believed that if he said it enough times that everything was fine, that it would be. Yeah. As I said, I know you didn't set out to write a guide book, but it turns out through your own emotional devastation you show away forward.

One of the things that impressed me is that even though you felt on some days like you couldn't get out of bed, you forced yourself to do the walk. Yes. Let's talk about that. A friend asked me just to walk like down the driveway.

This is when I felt like I couldn't get out of bed like a weighted blanket was on top of me. And I finally did it. I walked down the driveway and I thought, okay, I can do this. The fresh air feels good. the trees feel good to be in nature.

And I went a little bit farther every day. It eventually became an eight mile walk every day. This was COVID, so we had more time. And I would go one direction one day in a circle and the other direction the next day. And as I walked, I would rarely run into anybody or see anybody.

And I would weep as I walked.

“And looking back on it, I think that I was literally walking through the pain.”

I was feeling every part of it. And that was really good for me. And I think moving my body, that sort of meditation of your feet on the pavement was helpful and kind of getting me just a little bit more alive, like a little bit better. So you know, one of the reasons why we were comparing it to death because there is a grieving

that takes place. Yes. You're grieving the life you had. If you've been betrayed, you're grieving how did this happen and what about this. You're grieving the life you had.

And you're also grieving the life you don't think you now will have. Exactly. It's both. And you're grieving the actual person who you miss. Yes.

And you're grieving the narrative that you've been telling yourself for years. Because there's a whole lot of you. You don't fall out of love immediately, even though this is happening.

And people assume you do, but I never had a chance to fall out of love with them.

I had to, I had to do that on my own after he was gone. And that was very painful because I saw that's a really important thing to say. Because a lot of women, the moments you tell your friends, they think you're done. Because then it's done. It's over.

Yeah. And the friends are like, forget him. Exactly. Exactly. Get him out now.

Yeah. Exactly. And I really was in love with this man and it took a while. I kept, when I would see him at a graduation, it was like my hand wanted to hold his hand and it took a while for my body to catch up to that.

“And how long before you were able to be able to release that?”

I think it took, it definitely took longer than a year. I would say maybe a year and a half. Yeah. I think that's really important. Yeah.

It really did. And I think I kept having fantasies that this was some great mistake and that he really regretted it and he was really sad. And I had to. How long did you think that he was going to call you and say, I'm sorry.

I made him a mistake. I'm coming back. For a long time, I think, also almost a year. And I just kept thinking that he must be in pain and sad too and I don't think he was. No.

He was bouncing up the steps when he said, tell the girls. Exactly. The thing that you saw in his countenance, his president, you looked up the window and said, gosh, he looks really happy. He was a lady.

He was, he was. He was. That's what's really hard to accept. It's so hard. Because you are the opposite, you are incredible, you're a, you're a, you're a bathroom

floor. You write on page 27 slowly over many months, as my head came out of the sand, a form of joy set in, joy point of replacing the not knowing with knowing, the nub of worry with clarity, the lack of control with control, all made easier, of course, by the fact that I had enough to feel secure to make my children's secure.

But I love this moment when you say, this is better than everything I lost. This is better than the life I thought I wanted. So what it transpired in all this. A number of things that transpired. I was then divorced.

I was, I returned to my maiden name. I was fully in charge of my own finances. I was now starting the life as a writer.

And I never would have left my marriage.

I never would have thought there was reason to leave my marriage. And I don't think I was self-actualized in my marriage. So it was almost like the universe delivered this to me, so that I could end up in this

But I would choose this joy again and again.

And you started to feel it in little increments, taking small steps.

“When you, I think it was several months after he left, was it the summer when you started”

lighting the kids come over? Yes. Something you wouldn't have done before? No, I would not have. I would have thought, oh God, they're going to make a mess and it's too loud.

And I just was a little more brittle. And they just started coming over in droves. I think kids can be sometimes more comfortable when it's just one parent. And they were happy and they were loud and they were toasting things in the kitchen.

It was just so happy and joyful and I found I was just so much more relaxed in it.

I think because all these things that I had depended on, like these structures had fallen away, I could be more relaxed. I didn't have like this type grip on everything anymore. And I thought, okay, this is a silver lining that I can be like this. And friends notice too.

They notice that I was just a little easier, a little like I let things go more easily. You shouldn't run around the edges. I softened around the edges. I really did. And that felt much more like the true mean.

Yeah. And so in the end, you learned about the stranger he was, but you had been also a stranger to yourself. I think that's exactly right.

“I think that the title really works in that way too because I had really lost that self”

knowledge. I think in a marriage that I thought was very happy, but I had moved over those 20 years farther and farther away from what I believe were my passions and talents and a true knowing of myself. And why did you do that?

Do you think? I think a couple of reasons I think with three kids and the chaos of family that can happen. But I think in our situation, his career became so dominant. It was like the family enterprise and everything moved towards that and that was why he missed parent teacher conferences and couldn't go to the birthday party on the weekend.

And I think when that happens, it is very easy for the other parent to really lose sight of that. This passage felt so visceral to me after you signed the divorce settlement, you right. I thought I will let this go now. I will not live in this conflict anymore.

I was successful for the most part in letting it go. I don't think about the details of our divorce, I don't focus on what was lost, what remains, what still brings a lump to my throat, a chill to my bones, is not about money. It's a possibility that there was a timetable, a clock that I didn't hear ticking. It is his willingness to make me afraid when I was already devastated, already on the

floor. It is what he made clear within weeks of leaving, that he believed my contributions to his career, to our family over 20 years, amounted to nothing. Wow. What do you now know where your contributions?

I believe, I think women who are not working to carry kids, you know, have meaningful work in other ways, but when there is this family enterprise that you're supporting, I do think that's a huge contribution and that it should have been acknowledged in the divorce.

Well, I want to talk about this idea that runs through the book that healing doesn't always

come with reconciliation, that's one of the things that comes clear here, how did you come to accept that you can heal even when the apology or the explanation or the why did this happen to me never comes? It's very hard, it's very hard to move beyond it when you don't have that kind of neat wrapping up and an apology would have done it to, or an acknowledgement would have

done it to, but I didn't get the explanation, I did not get the acknowledgement either of the pain that he had caused.

“So I think the only thing that worked was really just moving it to the side and really”

focusing on the type of work I wanted to do, the things like my legal cases and having sort of that existential peace with a vacuum of knowing, you know, just sort of like parking it somewhere in my head and the way I park it with him is what he said the first day, which was that a switch went off and that's what I believe. I think a switch went off, there were the whispers over the years on the financial story,

but that's I think I just had to park it somewhere and then move on from it. And except that that's it. I really had to accept, I wasn't going to get anything else.

Yep. Okay.

So the New York Times recently published an interview with you and when they reached out

to your ex-husband, he provided the statement he said, "Wow, I disagree with many of her recollections as well as her overall mischaracterization of my relationship with my children and I do not wish to comment in more detail in order to protect them from further violations of their privacy other than to say that I continue to lovingly support and be lovingly supported by my children.

What do you think of that response?" I was actually happy that he responded. There has been so much silence that I was glad that he spoke about, said something and I don't disagree with some of it.

“I think that he has been always loving with them and they've been loving and supportive”

of him. I'm glad for that. I'm really grateful for that, that they have that kind of rapport.

But I don't think I mischaracterized him in the book either during the marriage or after

the marriage. I was very, very careful with my words because I knew my children would be reading this. And what do your children think of the book? They're funny. I printed it and put it on my desk and I said, "Come read it whenever you want to."

It sat there for three weeks and then I found my girls reading it in bed and then it was on the floor. I think kids just don't take it as seriously as we all do. Yeah. I think they're very proud of me and they're also very loving and supportive of their

dad. So it's like they have they have both things, but I think that what I hope I've done, which felt really important to me, is to recreate what he was as a father during all those years and all the wonderful things that he did with them and all because when it ends the way, mind it, all of that kind of gets erased for me and for kids and for him.

And I wanted that. But he would have been a record. He would that night. He was. He was doing all of that and he was clamoring and he was taking them to musicals and I didn't

want that to be lost and I hope that some part of him is glad that there's a record of that.

“What is your relationship with your husband, ex-husband?”

It is cordial. He sent me the flood insurance bill that he received for the house or we will communicate about my youngest graduation, which is in May. So we will work on it. We will go to the graduation.

We will both go to the graduation. Very important to her that he'd be there. So there's no anger and it's cordial, but it is not close and I don't think it will ever be close. Are you, I was saying to your mother, I know she's proud of you.

Are you proud of yourself or writing this book? I am. I am. I can't quite believe it actually. I can't quite believe that I have announced now to the entire world that my husband left

me that this is now imprint everywhere. It's kind of an embarrassing story.

But I've always seen the purpose in it.

“I've always imagined that one reader who's going through it who feels very alone and that”

this might reach them and I just am so excited and proud that I took each step and that I was able to write this and get a published and that it's now out there in the world. Yes. It's out there in the world. Bestseller.

Bestseller. Thank you, Bellburden. Thank you for joining me on my porch. And thank you to you Amanda for being a part of our conversation. I know that by sharing your story, I mean, because so many women have already talked

about it, that you have validated the experience of countless, countless women who have been betrayed, who have felt abandoned, who were lied to, who did understand, who were told they were crazy. You're giving hope and that is such a beautiful thing. Thank you so much.

Strangers. It's a memoir, a marriage, available wherever books are sold, but you're going to see your story in here. If you've been through any kind of betrayal, any kind of divorce. Thank you.

Thank you so much. You can subscribe to the over podcast on YouTube and follow us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. I'll see you next week. Thanks, everybody.