Belle Burden’s wealth is all over the pages of her hit divorce memoir Strangers. She spends the pandemic at her house on Martha’s Vineyard, situated on a lake with a waterway that leads out Vineyard Sound, allowing her husband to practice his boating hobby. In normal, non-summer times, they lived in a multimillion-dollar apartment in Tribeca in New York City, where he kept a boat that he took out “every weekend.” She details renovating the Vineyard place shortly after buying it to remove the pizza oven in the kitchen, combine “his” and “hers” bathrooms, and fill in the pond that bred mosquitos. They then joined the local tennis club. She describes things she and her husband acquired over the years, like Berenice Abbott photographs and Amex points, as “the stuff you accumulate when you are married, have kids, and have money.”

This seemingly perfect life is interrupted, Burden writes, when she receives a call one day from someone telling her that her husband is having an affair. In her telling, her husband walks out on her and their three kids. The New Yorker’s Jessica Winter investigated Burden’s finances, casting serious doubt on her claim in the book that she would “lose my financial security” if her ex claimed his share of their two homes in the divorce. Burden’s husband earned millions at his hedge fund job, while she acted as her kids’ primary caretaker. Burden didn’t end up losing her homes. She did end up on the podcast circuit as a cautionary tale for women who ignored their finances during marriage only to worry intensely about them during divorce. 

While this seems like another tale of sloppy publishing, I don’t think Burden set out to con any of us. I think she believes her divorce — in her pizza oven-replacing, country club-belonging, generational wealth-funded social set — could have forced her to the edge of a financial precipice. Only, maybe her financial precipice is, to the average person, more like a flat road, on which a driver is waiting to take her for a spa weekend at the Four Seasons. Her grandmother is Babe Paley (one of Truman Capote’s swans) and she is a descendant of Cornelius Vanderbilt. Her multi-trust fund reality is simply not the same as many of her readers.

Burden’s fear stemmed from a prenup stipulating that assets earned during their marriage would belong to each of them upon divorce, and only joint assets split. She explained that her lawyer advised against this arrangement before they married, but that because her husband wanted it, she acquiesced.

Burden made it sound like she basically spent all her money on their homes, emptying one trust for the just under $4 million apartment in Tribeca and her “last trust” for the $5.4 million place on the Vineyard. She asserted that she lacked income while her husband earned a fortune, and that she was unable to buy him out of their properties, which would have forced her to sell them. Winter’s New Yorker piece draws on publicly available records and court documents that show that Burden seems to have had a whole lot more money than she let on in the book and many interviews to promote it: documents from 1999 list her financial assets and trusts at $63 million, $45 million of which belonged in a trust that will pass to Burden and her brother when her stepmother dies; income totaling $800,000 in 2019; a 2020 statement showing her net worth in excess of $10 million.

“The over-all picture is of a person whose long-term financial security appeared guaranteed,” concludes Winter. Last year, Burden listed the Tribeca place for just under $12 million.

Lots of social media commenters have called Winter’s story unfair or mean-spirited, saying that none of it changes Strangers’s emotional resonance or Burden’s heartache, now part of the zeitgeist. I found Winter’s piece fair and well-researched. While I believe what happened to Burden was traumatic and awful, Winter’s reporting did change my perception of Strangers, set to become a Netflix movie starring Gwyneth Paltrow.

Winter was not the first to harbor suspicion toward Strangers, published under the same imprint, Dial Press, and editor, Whitney Frick, as billionaire investor Amy Griffin’s memoir The Tell. Griffin’s book described her recovered memory through MDMA therapy of being raped repeatedly by her middle school teacher in Amarillo, Texas. The New York Times later investigated her claims, and a former classmate sued Griffin for stealing her story. This all came out after Griffin’s book became an Oprah’s Book Club pick and sold 100,000 copies.

Having seen what happened with The Tell, critic Jan Harayda (whose books newsletter is excellent) wondered in February if Burden’s book was “another fake memoir.” “Lately I’ve wondered if a bizarre literary micro-trend is emerging” Harayda wrote. “Call it Suspicious Memoirs by Rich White Hedge-Funders’ Wives With the Same Editor and Publisher.”

Some online discourse has centered on why Dial Press didn’t check documents relating Burden’s divorce and finances. After all, Winter cites publicly available records. This does not mean that they are necessarily easy to obtain. While some courts make some documents available online, many exist as physical files that reporters have to dig through, page by page. In order to see Anna Wintour’s publicly available trust fund documents, I had to travel to Cambridge (where her grandparents lived) and spend a day digging through boxes — hundreds and hundreds of pages of documents — to get the complete picture of her financial situation to write Anna.

This is not an editor or book publisher’s job, but that doesn’t absolve them of responsibility. “Book publishers are not investigators,” Burden’s editor Whitney Frick told the New York Times when they investigated Griffin’s story. “This is Amy’s story. We trust her, and all of our authors, that they are recounting their memories truthfully.”

But memories can be fact-checked. Memoirs can be fact-checked, just as Winter’s New Yorker story surely was. I know book editors who set memoir authors up with fact checkers (typically paid for by the author), a worthwhile investment for high profile projects to ensure there are no mistakes that risk casting doubt on an entire book. Publishers typically have a sense of which books will be monster hits, and therefore which books they should insist on this layer of protection for. I don’t think fact checking would or should have prevented Dial Press from publishing Burden’s story, but it likely would have led to a much stronger book with different emphases and themes. Both Burden and her readers deserved a better edit.

In a statement provided to The New Yorker, Burden said, “When I wrote Strangers, I shared my heartache, my mistakes, and my shame. I owned my privilege as plainly as I could, and I respected the privacy of sealed court records. I stand by everything I wrote, including the fear I felt from my ex-husband’s threats, the contributions I made and could make to my family, and what happened to me financially and emotionally in my marriage and divorce.”

I’m not sure Winter’s piece will alter the trajectory of Burden’s book or the Netflix adaptation. But none of this seems likely to do the struggling nonfiction book publishing industry any favors. If readers decide they can’t trust these books, why would they buy them? Nonfiction book publishing is in survival mode right now. These don’t seem like risk publishers can afford to take.

Jeff Bezos Has Rich Face, Anne Hathaway Has Braids

Jeff Bezos kicked off Memorial Day weekend by giving an interview to Andrew Ross Sorkin on CNBC’s Squawk Box in which he said raising his tax rate won’t help a teacher in Queens, Trump is “more mature” in his second term, and other insane things. People are calling it embarrassing. I can’t argue with that. I want to do my part to draw attention to an aspect of this display that’s not getting as much attention as it should, and that is, whatever happened/is happening to his face. It would appear that Jeff Bezos has rich face now.

If he wants to buy the Met Gala, go to couture shows, get photographed by Annie Leibovitz for Vogue, and cosplay a fashion person, his taste and personal aesthetic are fair game for the news media. No, we don’t know what he’s doing exactly unless he tells us, and he may have an army of Instagram retouchers and lighting experts on his staff who make him look his best at all times. But if Anne Hathaway has to talk to Elle about how she uses braids to pull her face taut and didn’t make “a huge medical decision” to have a facelift, Jeff Bezos ought to have to talk to about his face, too. We all know he can’t say it’s just braids!

Correction: An earlier version of this piece mistakenly described Burden’s grandmother as descended from Babe Paley, when she is in fact Burden’s grandmother.

Google Changes Will Be Terrible for Fashion Publishers

Google seems intent on ruining publishing anew by transforming search as we know it.

At its Google I/O conference last week, the company unveiled plans to swap its search bar for an “intelligent search box” that resembles chatting with an AI bot. A video Google released of this experience reveals just how damaging these changes will be for publishers, particularly fashion-oriented ones. In the video, someone selects photos of dresses on their phone and asks Google to find them similar styles. This allows users to bypass the blue links from, say, Vogue or New York magazine, aggregating “best wedding guest outfits” or “mother’s day gifts.” These stories may be generic and dilute lots of sites, but they are filled with affiliate links, kickbacks from which employ entire teams of people and help fund journalism.

Search traffic has been declining at publishers for a while now, and legacy media executives like Condé Nast CEO Roger Lynch are preparing for the day when it plummets to zero. It’s hard to imagine this not resulting in job losses and therefore the further degradation of media, which already degraded itself to maximize appearances in search results by writing some of the most boring stories imaginable. Even Vogue publishes items around the classic search query “what time is the super bowl.” Entire teams were established at publishers to help editors come up with stories that they could rank for in Google (“what time is the super bowl” is probably SEO Hunger Games for clicks at this point but there are soooo many other equally inane terms that outlets can rank for). The revenue from the affiliate links in these stories contributed meaningfully to publishers’ bottom lines, and they won’t make it up overnight. Some outlets will go out of business. While I don’t think many editors will miss serving as Google proxies at dying media businesses, they have every right to be furious at this outcome.

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