You can also find this episode on Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also find it on YouTube.

If you haven’t already read Belle Burden’s memoir Strangers, you’ve likely seen it or heard of it.

Strangers is a beautiful, hard-won, honest, and ultimately affirming story about the shocking end of Belle’s marriage, and what she chose to do after.

I loved the book, but whether you’ve read it or not, I think there’s so much to take from what Belle shares in our conversation today.

We talk about how, and why, so many of us organize our families around a patriarchal figure; and about carrying the weight of wanting to make a partner feel good—above wanting to make ourselves feel good.

We talk about the common discomfort and deep ambiguity many women have toward money, and how we could approach our finances in a partnership instead.

We talk about friends in the aftermath of divorce, why Belle chose to tell her story in the way she has, and the person she has evolved into since.

HER BOOK: Strangers

Follow Belle on Instagram

ELISE:

Here we are. I’m very excited for this conversation, but I mean, congrats, Belle, and this book is so deserving. And I have to say, I feel like having blurbed the book, more people have commented to me about reading my blurb on your book than have commented to me about my book, like everyone, which is also funny because it’s such a ... Do blurbs matter? It’s one of the big questions in publishing and now I’m like, yeah, people read blurbs apparently because ...

BELLE:

Yes. And I remember getting your blurb. It was the first one that I got ... It was you and Adrian Brodeur came in at the same time and I thought I wasn’t going to get any blurbs at all and your blurb was so fantastic. And I just loved your book so much that it felt like this incredible endorsement of what I was trying to do.

ELISE:

Thank you.

BELLE:

So I’m thrilled. I’m thrilled that you’re on there.

ELISE:

Yeah. There’s some little bit of rhyming with On Our Best Behavior and Strangers, even though they could not be more different, but they’re obviously about sort of this programmed goodness. Yeah, that we play out in our lives. And I saw that my former boss is going to play you in a movie.

BELLE:

It looks that way. I find Hollywood so interesting and confusing because nothing has been signed. Oh,

ELISE:

But it’s outright.

BELLE:

We did land on a team and with her Molly-

ELISE:

It’s your lawyer. So you made the paperwork, right?

BELLE:

I’m a lawyer, so I don’t really get it, but I think they will things into being and eventually we will sign something, but I’m thrilled. I think she’ll be amazing at it. I think she’s so incredibly talented and I love seeing her return to acting and I thought she was amazing in Marty Supreme. I think she really understands the book and what I was trying to do and she will handle it very sensitively. So I feel good about that.

ELISE:

Yeah. And very lucky. It’s

BELLE:

Surreal.

ELISE:

It’s perfect in a sense because there’s really no one who is more indelibly connected to divorce in some ways than she is, right? I mean, she consciously uncoupled ... It was one of my first months on the job and I was credited with that in People Magazine. I was like, “That was not me. I wish I were genius enough to rebrand divorce, but no, I cannot claim that.” But it’s kind of perfect, this idea of conscious and coupling, because in many ways what happened to you is almost the polar opposite, right? It is a deeply unconscious. It’s almost like your husband was like, “I’m going to pretend like this marriage, this family never happened. I’m going to take no responsibility for the aftermath and I’m just going to put it in a closet and move on with my life and put it all in the dark.” I mean, it’s kind of perfect.

BELLE:

Yeah. It’s interesting because I hadn’t even thought of the conscious uncoupling aspect to this with her casting until a week afterwards. And I thought, “Oh my God, that is quite amazing because it’s quite meta. It’s what I longed for. I longed for a discussion, an exchange of the reasons for the divorce and how we are going to set up our lives going forward. I longed for all of that and I got the opposite.

ELISE:

The opposite. Yeah. So I am guessing that most of the people listening have, if they haven’t read your book, they’ve encountered it or they know something about it. But will you set the table for us? Will you take us to that night?

BELLE:

Yeah. So the book opens in March of 2020 during the second week of COVID lockdown, which I think we all remember that time as being very terrifying and uncertain. We did not know when we’d get a vaccine. We didn’t know. We thought it was going to last two weeks. It ended up lasting a lot longer. But my husband and our two daughters, we moved to our house in Martha’s Vineyard because it was very isolated, felt very safe. And even though it was scary, we had a very cozy week. My husband was cooking a lot. He was chopping wood. He was building fires. I was going for walks. The girls were playing Fortnite and my older daughter was learning to make pasta. And one night after dinner, I was mopping the floor and I got a call from an unknown number. I let it go to voicemail and then I played the message and it was a man saying, “I’m sorry to tell you this, but your husband is having an affair with my wife.” And it came as a brutal blow, a complete shock because I thought I was very happily married.

I was very much in love with my husband and I had seen no signs of his unhappiness, had no real sense of discord. And that night he really tried to explain it. He said, “It didn’t last long. I love you. I love our marriage.” But by the morning, 6:00 AM, he walked into our bedroom fully dressed with a bag packed and said, “I thought I was happy, but I’m not. I thought I loved our life, but I don’t, and I want a divorce and I’m going to leave now.” And he walked out, left the island and really from that moment he walked into my room into our bedroom, his whole affect had changed the look in his eyes, it was very cold and that shift to this new person continued. I did not encounter my husband again. He became someone I really did not recognize.

ELISE:

It’s such a wild story and yet so beautifully told in the following pages, you’re a wonderful writer and we’ll talk about that at some point, but what also fold, and I think this is why the book is so singular and yet so universal at the same time and why we’re all reading it sort of looking for clues convinced that we can diagnose what happened, that we can figure out what personality disorder he has or we can spot the flaws in your personality that would’ve driven him far away We’re all reading it like Angela Lansbury searching in the what’s left to understand, “Is this going to happen to me? “ Because it’s terrifying, right? As you write, there’s not a drifting, there’s not a lack of intimacy, it’s just done. He just shuts the door and goes. What do you think happened from the hours of 1:00 to 6:00 AM?

BELLE:

Well, he was actually asleep for most of those hours because I was wide awake and he was sleeping in my son’s room and he was asleep. But the one thing that happened that I write about in the book is that the woman he was having an affair with attempted suicide that night and I learned that from her husband. She took some sleeping pills and ended up in an ambulance. I think that was not the reason why he walked out, but it was perhaps a factor. He said he wanted to go check on her. So I think that maybe made it more real for him, but still doesn’t explain how on can go from where we were in this very intimate, supportive place to walking out the door. I thought that we would have to do therapy on Zoom. We were stuck in this house together.

I was not looking forward to it. I thought it would be really painful and difficult, but I thought that’s what we were going to do after an affair is discovered. But the complete shift to I am done and walking out, I don’t actually know to this day what happened for him. He has never explained it to me. The most that he has said is that a switch went off and one other time he said that something broke in him. So that is actually where I land because I’ve had to park it somewhere in my brain and I think that’s how it felt to him that there was a before and there was an after. And I think of him playing a role really for a very ... We all play roles and I think he loved the role of husband and father for a period of time.

And then for some reason he felt like he couldn’t do it anymore. He did not want to play those roles anymore. And for him, that was like taking off a costume and exiting stage left. I don’t think I could do it that way. I don’t think I’m built that way, but for him there was this very much a shedding of these roles. But going back to what you said at the beginning, I think people really read it thinking they can figure it out. And I think that that desire would, if they were successful, they would feel more safe in this. And I think people find the book scary because it feels so impossible, even if you’re in a happy marriage and it feels impossible, but it also feels kind of possible. Someone could wake up and say, “I don’t want this anymore.” And that’s very scary.

ELISE:

Yeah. I mean, I remember writing to Whit Frick, your editor, our mutual editor when I sent in a blurb and I was thinking I should even look at it because, and I think that my blurb spoke to this, but this idea that sometimes we’re left with these remnants of a story that we can’t put back together and that don’t make sense in so many ways your book was so honest even as it was deeply unsatisfying, but much more accurate or left to our own devices will make up all sorts of stories about why something happened. And I remember her saying, I was like, “I think that’s why this book is so powerful. It’s incredibly powerful that she’s willing, brave enough to leave it at end.” And she was like, “Oh, the early readers on good reads are upset.” And I don’t know if she ever shared that with you, but she was like, “I’m sweating because readers are pissed.”

BELLE:

Yep. And I worried about it too because I thought that people would feel frustrated and unsatisfied by there not being a happy ending. We were talking about book clubs earlier and we heard one piece of feedback that they weren’t choosing it because it was not a happy ending. And I think that was another aspect that we worried about because there was no reunion, there was no new man. So in addition to the lack of satisfaction and no answer, there was not sort of a neat wrapping up. I of course see it as a deeply happy ending, but it did not fall within the lines of a true arc of a story where you have an answer, you have a resolution. And I’m actually really just happy to see that people can sit with the discomfort of not having an answer.

ELISE:

Even

BELLE:

If they’re frustrated, I think they see the reality and honesty in that. And I think I’m not alone in encountering something where I was never going to get an answer and to make peace with that in some sort of existential way.

ELISE:

Yeah. Well, it is, I think, more honest. And if we are honest with each other or with ourselves, we recognize even if you’re in a long-term committed quote unquote happy relationship, you can never see inside of another person. It all hangs in the balance.

BELLE:

Yes, it does. Especially as the age and change and life is unpredictable.

ELISE:

And I don’t want to spend much time diagnosing him, but there was some family history, right? There’s a little bit of patterning here that offers maybe some clues about his own father.

BELLE:

It helped me to look at it the whole span of his life and what may have impacted him as a child, repeated patterns of behavior in both of our families for him, his father being unfaithful, leaving the family, having financial catastrophe in their family, all of which sort of played into his actions as a middle-aged man. I think there is nothing that I could point to and say A plus B equals C, but perhaps because that behavior was never talked about in his family that it can get repeated across generations, which is something I’ve come to believe to be true, at least in my family.

ELISE:

Yeah. Before hopping on with you, I was just talking to Mark Wolynn who wrote, It Didn’t Start with You. I don’t know if you’ve ever read that book about- I haven’t, but I’ve heard of it. Yeah. And it’s about sort of generational trauma that becomes attachment trauma and then people start reenacting patterns that don’t belong to them.

BELLE:

I’ve got to read that.

ELISE:

Yes. I got to read that. Yeah, he’s wonderful. All right. So let’s talk about you because you obviously are the most interesting part of this story and even though I think your stories also exemplifies the way that so many of us build our whole lives around centering or circling around this male patriarchal figure. And so you could talk a bit about that the way that your work, which maybe was never your passion, although maybe it is your passion in some way, but that what you did to make him feel good.

BELLE:

Yeah. And I think that is also a family pattern. I think in my family of origin, we all orbited around my father in a variety of ways and I definitely repeated that. I think it dated in terms of making him the center and a desire to often unconscious a desire to build him up started from the time before we got married and it really started with our financial inequity. I came to the marriage with inherited money in trust. He came to the marriage with earning a salary but not having any assets. And my family insisted that we sign a prenup and he was very pained by that, very hurt by that. And even without the prenup though, I felt that he felt less than in some way because of that power dynamic. So I think I entered the marriage eager. I loved him and eager for him to feel good and eager for his success, eager for him to fulfill his dreams.

And I think it took a number of forms. One of them was financial and I think I wanted to make him feel that he had some power financially. So when we bought our apartment and then our house, I put both of our names on the deeds. I gave him full control and supervision over our financial lives from our taxes to our ... I paid the bills online, but conversations with financial advisors and accountants and convinced myself that he was better able to handle it and really lost touch with the specifics on that. But I think the biggest thing probably is that his career and his ambition became the all- consuming focus of our marriage and of our family. And it was like everything was working towards it. I wanted to stay home with kids. That was important to me, but there was never sort of a re-balancing as the kids got older to put focus on what I might want to do next.

And I take responsibility for that, but it became his hard work, his going to the office on the weekends, his missing things with the kids became this all- consuming focus. And I think when you do that, you really start to lose touch with your own talents and passions and ambitions. I think that that’s really where I let myself down is this constant kind of lifting him up in all those ways.

ELISE:

Well, it’s interesting to think about the dynamics too, and I think we all relate to that in some way, how when you’re the person for whom everyone rotates and you’re not even conscious that you’re holding the center of gravity, if anything, you’re so removed from family life that you’re like, I mean, as evidenced by his behavior and being like, I don’t want joint custody, bye this, I don’t really have a role to play here. Meanwhile, you’re like, everything has been constructed for your comfort and to tune to you. It’s such a weird, but this is how so many of us set up our family structures.

BELLE:

Yes, I think that’s very well said. It’s very, very well said. It felt like it was all tuned to his desires, but I think you’re right. He didn’t feel essential to the running of the house or the raising of the kids, which may have made it much easier to walk away from it.

ELISE:

Yeah. It’s a great irony where you’re both left and you’re like, I don’t understand. I’ve built a whole life with you on the stage and now my lead actor is abandoning this production. How does this work?

BELLE:

Yes. And the only answer is that you start taking the lead role is hard to envision when that actor leaves. But what I talk to my kids about on the financial thing is with my daughters to not assume that they can’t do it, to not assume that their spouse, if male or female, I guess, is better able to handle it or that it is somehow essential to their feeling good about themselves to hand that over, but also with my son to not tie his sense of self-worth to finances or to his work to the point where it is not an equal partnership. So I think those conversations are really important to have.

ELISE:

Well, and I think that your book really puts to light to the feeling, this sort of deep ambivalence that so many women have towards money and your money being inherited, it’s like, “I didn’t earn it. I don’t deserve it. Money is bad. It’s not really mine. I don’t have a relationship to it. “

BELLE:

I don’t understand

ELISE:

It. I don’t understand it. Yes. And so this, that I think so many of us relate to, whether we’ve inherited money or made every dime ourselves or come from nothing, it’s this deep, deep ambivalence about money.

BELLE:

And that

ELISE:

There’s something

BELLE:

Unattractive about claiming

ELISE:

Your

BELLE:

Power over it.

ELISE:

Yeah. And as you’ve learned in a brutal way, because by putting everything in your trust into the common area of your marriage and not preserving any of it for yourself, he’s entitled to half of everything that you have. And meanwhile, he was not putting his own money into a joint account, right? He kept his own ...

BELLE:

His assets stayed in his name. So my money was our money.

ELISE:

It’s so wild.

BELLE:

Was his money. Yes. And what’s really wild is that I was not conscious of that or I did not want to be conscious of that or I was just so trusting that he would treat me with the same sense of fairness and sharing that I did

ELISE:

In your prenup that he was like, “Anything that I earn is in my name.” How is that legal?

BELLE:

The standard prenup is that you keep what you come into the marriage with. In my case, I could keep it doubly because it was in trust, but so you keep what you come into the marriage with, but anything earned during the marriage is split fifty fifty. He asked me to change our prenup to say that anything earned during the marriage would not be split fifty fifty unless we affirmatively chose to put it into joint name. So then what happened was I moved my money out of trust, put it in joint name by putting his name on the deeds and he accumulates his assets, never hiding anything but not telling me what his bonus was and et cetera. And all of those accounts, only his name on it. And we split our expenses fifty fifty, the paying of the mortgage and all that kind of thing, but the bulk of his assets he accumulated in his own name.

And I was conscious on some level of ... And my lawyer advised me against making that change and I

ELISE:

Made

BELLE:

It anyway

ELISE:

Because

BELLE:

I wanted to please my fiance and make him feel good and make him feel like his wisdom was more important than a partner at Sullivan and Cromwell. And it was in my brain the whole marriage. I knew that this was out there, but I couldn’t quite address it and kind of say to myself, if this marriage ends, what is this going to mean for me and where are the assets and what is in his name and is he really not ... I think I assumed that he was not making a lot of money and that we were really pulling in the same direction in an equal way.

ELISE:

Yeah, that is a really hard lesson and I’m sorry you had to learn it.

BELLE:

And I’m absolutely, I’m super conscious of the fact that we are talking about a high level of privilege and that most women going through divorce have it much, much, much harder. And I turned out fine. It is not the life that I expected with him, but I wouldn’t trade this now

ELISE:

Being. No, no. And it’s all well taken, but you are reaffirming the story that women should fel really uncomfortable about money and that it’s not fair, it’s not appropriate. And if anyone is curious, it’s not like at the end he said, “Not only have I bailed on my family and abandoned you, I’m going to make this right.” No,

BELLE:

No, no, no. And what I’ve learned in talking to other women is if you’re left in this brutal way, you can expect that the divorce is going to be really, really brutal.

ELISE:

Yeah. And so I think for anyone who is listening, who is ostriching, which is a common, I think, it’s like you got to get nosy and involved in your financial life if you’re partnered and if you go into ... We have to decouple emotion from money and recognize it’s a currency and it’s an essential currency for functioning on this- And it’s

BELLE:

Power.

ELISE:

Yeah. And it’s power. And in that sense, marriage is a business, you’re not an employee, you’re a co-owner of this relationship, this business.

BELLE:

Absolutely. And I had moments writing the book where I just thought, am I going to really reveal that I did this, that I made these decisions? And I really got behind it. I want to tell this. And I occasionally feel like it’s a little painful to be a cautionary tale. And people say, “But you were a lawyer.” And I’m like, “I know. “ But I really feel that if my book has the impact of both my peers, older women or younger women not yet married, if it forces those conversations and the end of ostriching everything, that it will have a great purpose because it’s very unromantic, it’s dry, it’s not exciting, but all of us can understand it. And it is a quarterly conversation about where assets sit, whose name is on what, what would happen to you if the marriage ended and pushing for equality in that.

And most importantly, transparency, because I think even if you ask for that conversation, there are some partners who will not want to have that conversation with you and that really is a problem.

ELISE:

Yeah, right. And as impossible as it is to imagine the disillusion of a marriage with the person that you love, there’s deep acrimony and dare I say hate by the end of these partnerships and people get wildly nasty and scared and their worst parts come out. And so anything that you can do to protect yourself now without reigning on the marriage, but it’s a business and business. And these are big questions.

All right, let’s talk about the emergence of Belle, right? Because this book in many ways is your coming out story. Your second Cotillion. I’m just kidding.

BELLE:

I didn’t have one, just so you know. I didn’t know. Thank God I would have been very uncomfortable.

ELISE:

Which I know has been excruciating is the deeply introverted person, but you have been born again both as a writer and as the protagonist of your own life. And as someone who has broken this pattern that has played out on your side of the family. So can you talk a little bit about that and these norms that you were abiding by about what we do and do not do as nice ladies?

BELLE:

Yes, absolutely. Yes. And I really did learn it. I learned it by watching. I learned it by listening. I learned it in my bones. I think it’s in my bones. Both my grandmother and my mother were with unfaithful men, my grandmother with her husband, her second husband and my mother with her boyfriend of 30 years. And they were serial philanderers, but my mother and my grandmother were taught and taught me by example that you do not talk about it. These are private matters. You in fact clean up the mess, which often can be a public mess and you protect the man. Yo really protect the man’s reputation. Yo protect the man’s belief in his own importance and you carry on and your hurt or pain or embarrassment or any feeling in the matter is just not what’s important. The important part is staying quiet about it really.

And when I got married, I thought I was marrying the opposite of these men. They were public figures, big personalities. I was marrying pretty quiet, fairly introverted lawyer who did not have a public presence. He was not flirtatious with other women. And so I sort of had this smug sense that I was stopping this pattern, but of course I repeated it in this even more dramatic way because he didn’t want to come back. My grandfather and my mother’s boyfriend both begged for forgiveness and to come back. And in the days and weeks after he left, I really struggled with this. I thought, how did this happen again? How did this happen to me? Am I innately attracted to this? Are these men attracted to something in us? And I thought, how am I going to stop what is now really a pattern? Three generations, this is a pattern and how do I stop this for my kids?

And this really dovetailed with an impulse that I had from the first week after he left, which I still can’t really explain because I am very quiet, very private, much more so than my mother and my grandmother. But from the first week where he asked me to, he said he thought it would be better for us if I told people the split was amicable. When he asked me that, I just knew I would never lie about this. I would never lie about what was happening to me and in fact became quite open about it with people whenever I ran into them, whenever I ran into anybody. So the two things dovetailed into this conviction, which is carried through writing modern love and writing the book and now doing things like this, which is the only way to break the pattern. And honestly, for me to survive this emotional bomb was to be open and honest about it and to talk about it and to not protect the man and the story to my detriment.

I don’t know if this will repeat in the next generation or in my grandchildren’s generation, but I’m hopeful that I have changed the chemistry in our family by talking about this in what I hope is a very honest way that is not vengeful, but really names it and names the pain, names the impact on me both financial and social and emotional and does not kind of gloss it over with my children like, everything’s fine, this is all okay, but just say, “This is what happened and you lived through it and I lived through it and I’m hoping that changes something.” And then for my personality, I think it really is a shift for me to be so open about something that is kind of a humiliating story to have your husband leave you is a very hard thing to say, to admit, to be open about.

But I’m not just open about that. I’m open about mistakes. I’m open about my inner most intimate thoughts and it has been really liberating. It’s been really, to be honest about your life, it’s an incredible thing. And I think for me, I needed to hit total emotional rock bottom in order to be able to do that and to be able to reconstruct something, a sense of self that turned out to be much more true to my essential nature. And I don’t mean being public. I still am very introverted and after doing an event, I need to get in bed for a couple of days. But I mean in terms of just not being attached to things looking the right way or thinking what people think of me and living a much more free and relaxed way. So I’ve

ELISE:

Been talking,

BELLE:

I hope that makes sense.

ELISE:

No, totally. You writing your modern love, will you tell that story? Because I think that for anyone who is like even thinking about the impact of this book and its success and the fact that your query, which came in through no special regard, you just sent it to the Modern Love inbox and it sat there and sat there and sat there and sat there. Can you talk about that process a litle bit, just the inner courage of like, “I’m going to do this. “

BELLE:

I’m going to do it. So our divorce was done. We’d signed the documents and I really felt this desire to write down what had happened because so many different narratives were floating around and I really wanted to write it and I’d wanted to be a writer when I was a teenager. I got dissuaded from it by another classmate in college. And I found that as I started writing down the story of what happened, that I got very interested in the art of it again. I just was like, “Okay, how do I build suspense? When does the phone call come in? How do I write this in a style that feels powerful to me? “ And then I started taking a memoir writing class and I wanted to move on to the next thing and I just thought, okay, I’m going to ... I realized when I was working on it that I was pretty much writing it in the style of modern love, which I’ve always read for a very long time.

I looked up the word count and then when I was done, I just thought, “Okay, I’m just going to send it. I need to send it off to the universe.” Did not think it would be picked. Nine months went by. They usually say you get a response in three months, I think. And so I followed up and I emailed them and I said, “Can you just let me know either way?” And the editor of the column, the senior editor wrote back and said, “Actually, we want to publish it, but you should really think before we start editing, you should really think about if you want to do this, do you want to be public about this and talk to your children about it, talk to your family about it and really think if you want to do this. And if you do, we can get going, but think about it, take the weekend and think about it.

And I talked to my kids, I talked to my mother and my stepmother who had read it and loved the piece, but they were both very afraid for me. They thought there’s going to be a financial impact because your ex is going to be really angry. And they didn’t say it like this, but I think they said it more like, “Do you want your life story to be attached to this? Do you want your life story to be about your husband leaving you?” And I thought about all those things and it felt deeply terrifying, but there was absolutely no way I wasn’t going to do it. I just was super clear that I wanted to do it, even though it felt completely terrifying. I felt driven by a desire to, one, own my narrative, two, to be a published author, but really had a sense I felt so alone and so filled with shame and isolated as I went through it.

I just felt like I was the only person on earth and I had a sense that getting it out there would help other people. But the thing that I just can’t quite explain is just that I think because everything else had just kind of fallen apart and other than death or illness, this is the worst thing that I could imagine happening. So I just thought, “Fuck it, I’m going to do this. “

That felt great.

ELISE:

ELISE:

I’m sure there’s a deep desire. I mean, I think we can all put ourselves in your shoes and when we’ve been wronged, betrayed and done dirty, there is a deep desire too to be like, “Is he going to get away with this?” And I feel like in your writing of the book, the social response to what happened was not going your way, right? He was not censured. People were not outraged. I mean, I’m sure people were, but that it was the same BS. He’s the more important member of this tennis club. Prepare for battle Belle. Oh, men will be men. Boys will be boys.

BELLE:

Yes.

ELISE:

Playing

BELLE:

Hardball, all of those things. Yes. And I think the way I would phrase it, I think you’re right, but the way I would phrase it is that you really get erased.

ELISE:

You

BELLE:

Get really minimized and really erased in this process. And part of that is an acceptance of male behavior. I think if a woman did the same thing, it would not be accepted in the same way.

ELISE:

No.

BELLE:

But that acceptance of it and of what I felt like was real dismissal of me and an expectation that I would disappear, that I would sort of scurry off now that I didn’t have the hedge fund husband, it was the publishing of this felt like a, “Hang on, I’m not going anywhere and I’m actually going to tell you what happened.” And it was a real sort of flag in the ground of, “I am here and this is what happened to me and you can wish me to disappear. You can act like everything, nothing happened, but I’m going to tell you exactly what happened.” So that’s what it felt like.

Other than, “I don’t want you to get away with this.” It was more like, “I’m telling you that I am here.” And because he kind of expected me to just quietly go away and I wanted to tell him too, “I’m not. I’m absolutely not.”

ELISE:

It seems like watching friends divorce and even when things like this don’t happen where there’s this person really messed up and this person is behaving in a way that is wrong, right? And as you said, if a woman was like, “I had an affair. I’m leaving, have fun with the kids.” Yeah. I don’t want anything to- I mean, it’s wild to imagine. I’m moving into a place, I don’t have any bedrooms for the children. I’ll see them at a hockey game once a quarter. Yeah. Inconceivable. But I also seems from what I hear that the most painful part of a divorce too is that the loyalty lines are not drawn and that people won’t fight your battles with you and they’re like,

BELLE:

“Eh.” They won’t. And in fairness, I don’t think I would have either. I think I believed more in the idea of ... I mean, people talk about you have to be neutral. There are two sides to every story and you have to ... And I end up feeling like neutrality is very self-protective, right? Agree.You want to keep your relationship with both. You don’t know who’s going to end up at the club. You want to just keep all your options open. You don’t want to pass judgment. And now I really believe in taking a stand and saying, “This is not right. This person is not being treated fairly and I’m going to be clear about that and I’m going to be clear to them about that.”

And the people who did that with me, I still, I wish I wrote about some of them. It was just such a clarifying, clear ... It helped me so much because there’s so much gaslighting that goes on I think in these circumstances about what is real and not real and what’s okay and what’s not okay. And to have someone clear out that haze and say, “What’s happening to you is not right.” But I think in divorce it’s so easy when you’re trying to explain what’s happening to you or what’s happened to you, you tip so easily into being this sort of angry, bitter, rejected woman. And I talk about how it almost happened overnight to me that even though he had kind of done the unhinged thing, I became the hysteric overnight because I was upset and I was crying. And I think as the weeks went on, if you start to say, “He left me and he doesn’t want to pay me child support and he’s not going to do this and this,” you become sort of this whiny person.

I think women get very dismissed often as they try to describe what’s happening to them. So I had to be very careful and calculated and you could see people kind of looking down as you start to describe it. And I think that was part also for Modern Love. I’ve made you all uncomfortable when I try and tell you in person, but now I’m going to actually just write it. But I think it’s a challenge for all divorcing people to

ELISE:

Be

BELLE:

Able to explain what’s happening to them.

ELISE:

Yeah. And I think you can extrapolate it all to anyone who feels aggrieved by someone else and you’re like, “Yeah, I get it. On some level, this is a personal thing.” And then at the same time you’re like, “But how can you not extrapolate from this pattern of behavior that why would you choose them?” Why do they get a pass? Yeah. I don’t know.

BELLE:

That’s true. That’s really true.

ELISE:

So you glossed over this really quickly, but in, was it high school or college?

BELLE:

College.

ELISE:

College. You were shut down in a writing seminar by a classmate. And has he reached out to you? He

BELLE:

Has not.

ELISE:

I guess it wasn’t a big thing to him and it stuck in your mind and changed the course of your future.

BELLE:

Yeah, it was probably a 30-second critique of a short story. I’d arrived in college believing I was going to be a writer. I got into a selective writing seminar and submitted a short story and a senior, a guy who spoke with great, he was very cool-looking. He spoke with great authority and he said it wasn’t a specific critique on the story, but he said that I could not write, that I did not have technique or talent essentially. And I think he probably forgot about it five minutes after class and I changed the whole trajectory of my life and I got through the class, but I stopped writing for 30 years and I’ve started to believe that my years as a lawyer and I’m still practicing actually have helped my writing. And so maybe this was all the right way to do it, but I would be horrified if my daughters believed someone so deeply that they stopped doing something they loved.

And so I don’t think the problem was that he said it. I think the problem definitely was that I believed it and that I acted on it. I know where he works. My brother found him on LinkedIn. And what’s interesting is a couple people from our university reached out to me to say, “Is it this guy? Because it sounds like him.” And that was quite amazing because I was like, “It is.” So they must have been in class with him too. So that was-

ELISE:

Is he a New York Times bestselling author?

BELLE:

He is not a writer at all interesting. No, he’s not.

ELISE:

Send him your book scan numbers and clipping The New York Times book review.

BELLE:

I might do that. I’m sort of hoping that he’ll read it and recognize himself.

ELISE:

I recently saw a college boyfriend who was a lot of things but somewhat diminishing or very competitive with me in a way that I didn’t really understand when we were 18 or 19. And he is a writer as well with some success and we were chatting and so I was like, “Tell me about what you’re up to. “ And he was telling me how he was writing book reviews and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and working on a novel. I was like, “That’s amazing.” And then he looked at me and he said, “So you’re an influencer?” Oh my God. And I said, “Are you- What did you say?” I said, “I’m not an influencer.” And he was like, “I don’t mean that disrespectfully.” Well, yes, you do. Yes, you do. Yeah. Yes, you do. Actually, I’m an author and a better selling one than you.

You fucking asshole.

BELLE:

Exactly. He’s like, “I am going to make you smaller.”

ELISE:

Can I diminish you? Yeah, I hadn’t seen him in 20 years. I was like, “Here we go again.” But it was actually helpful, Bell, because I was like, “Oh, that’s what. “ You can see it

BELLE:

So clearly.

ELISE:

Yeah. And I feel like when I graduated from college, I had certainly been knocked down however many pegs and just did not think of myself as a serious person. Right. So it worked.

BELLE:

He had

ELISE:

Gotten in your head. And now he was not

BELLE:

Going to.

ELISE:

Yeah. So anyway, I was like, oh, thank you. Thank you. That is where that came from.

BELLE:

Exactly who I thought you were.

ELISE:

Yes. Men. All right, Bell. Well, I’m so happy for you. I’m sure that this is ... Well, you’re going to go and be an amazing novelist. That’s what’s next. Yeah?

BELLE:

Who knows? I’m going to try, but who knows? We’ll see what happens. I’m just excited to be able to find time to write again and to do it. But now I’ve been interviewed by you twice and they’re top of the list.

ELISE:

Oh, thank you. And just because you’re

BELLE:

Just so smart and I do think it dovetails with your book so well. It’s a lot of similar themes and your book was so helpful to me. Oh,

ELISE:

Good. Thank you. So beautifully written too. Yeah. That programmed goodness. It only really gets us that far so far, right? And then when it falls apart, it’s like. Holy shit. I have structured my whole life on playing a role that I thought would keep me safe.

BELLE:

Yes.

ELISE:

But thanks for making the other side look so great.

BELLE:

Thank you. I’m glad. I’m glad. I’m glad. It’s much better over here.

ELISE:

So I just want to double click a little bit on the culture that Bell grew up in as coming from a long lineage of New York City socialites and the way that being a good woman was patterned for her and passed down to her. And she said it as well the way that she covered, that her mother and her grandmother covered for the men in their life. She writes, “We had all been taught to fill in the hole that men left to be quiet about men behaving badly to move on with grace. Publishing an account of what happened to me was shining a light on that hole the deep crevice James had left. I was refusing something, the cleaning up, the grace.” And then after she publishes the piece, her mom writes to her, “You have spoken for so many women, including me, who have suffered the consequences of ruthless male prerogative and behavior.

No more shutting up women about what men have always gotten away with. Rebirth, new life. I am so proud.” All right, friends, I will see you next time. If you got something out of today’s episode, I would so appreciate your help spreading the word. Please rate and review the episode, follow pulling the thread on your preferred podcast platform and share this episode with a friend who would also enjoy it. That’s how we grow this thing. It’s so helpful. Thank you.