Belle Burden comes from the kind of aristocratic family that never airs its dirty laundry or lets down the façade of perfection. So when her 20-year marriage imploded, she did the unthinkable: she wrote about it. Her Modern Love column became the book Strangers, an instant New York Times best-seller in the No. 1 spot. The paper’s reviewer described it as “a love story and a horror story and, in one nail-biting section, a financial thriller.” Now, according to the New York Post, a bidding war has erupted over the film rights, allegedly with Gwyneth Paltrow and others vying to play Burden.
A descendant of the Vanderbilts, a granddaughter of Babe Paley, and the daughter of Amanda Burden, an urban planner, and the late politician, Carter Burden, Belle spent her life being good, polite—“coloring within the lines,” as she puts it. She writes Strangers, remarkably, without bitterness or self-pity. It isn’t just about the end of a marriage. It’s about what happens when you finally stop playing the part.
