Ocean House Author Series Features Belle Burden of ‘Strangers’ and Other Renowned Writers
The book events include wine, light bites and a signed copy of each book. Read on for a Q-and-A with Burden featured at her live book talk with Deborah Goodrich Royce.
Author of Strangers, Belle Burden, with Deborah Goodrich Royce at the Ocean House Author Series event in April.
The Ocean House in Watch Hill recently launched a new Ocean House Author Series, hosted by an author herself, Deborah Goodrich Royce, who is also the owner of the Ocean House with her husband, Chuck Royce. The author series continues through September with a lineup of celebrated writers. Belle Burden, national best-selling author of the memoir Strangers, detailed the aftermath of her sudden divorce from her husband in an exclusive Q-and-A at the Ocean House’s first author event in the series in April.
Strangers is Burden’s shocking memoir about more than twenty years of marriage that comes to a sudden stop when Belle receives a random voicemail right at the beginning of the pandemic. She’s quarantined with her husband and their two daughters on Martha’s Vineyard when she listens to the recorded call. “I am looking for Belle. I hate to tell you this but your husband is having an affair with my wife.” After the initial shock, she confronts her husband about the affair, and his response is to pack his bags and leave the island right away, abandoning his family with no thought of splitting custody of their kids. He said he thought this was the life he wanted, but it’s not. What follows is her story about healing and rising above the ruins in a small-knit community where people can be cruel. It’s also about recovering from generational trauma and not accepting this behavior as women in her family had previously covered up their heartbreak or stayed silent from similar situations.
Each author event at the Ocean House includes a glass of wine and light bites, like a cheese plate or crudite, and a signed copy of the book from Martin House Books. Tickets are $45 per person, and events are open to both resort guests and the public.
Here’s the upcoming lineup of featured authors:
May 27: Katherine Center, The Shippers
June 24: Annabel Monaghan, Dolly All the Time
July 1: Luanne Rice, Until Midnight
July 8: Beatriz Williams, When You Loved Me
July 16: Jenna Bush Hager, Deborah Curtis, & Shannon Garvey, Laws of Love and Logic, June Baby
July 22: Don Winslow, The Final Score
August 5: Ruta Sepetys, A Fortune of Sand
August 12: Chris Bohjalian, The Amateur
August 19: Donna Freitas, Her One Regret
August 26: Allison Pataki, It Girl
September 2: Mary Kay Andrews, Road Trip
Belle Burden with Rhode Island Monthly editor-in-chief, Jamie Coelho.
Burden was amazing to meet in person at the Ocean House, and the audience was treated to an exclusive q-and-a with her, transcribed below:
Deborah Goodrich Royce: Has anyone else ever gone through a thing like this? I have. I want to ask you, Belle, why did you write this book?
Belle Burden: A few things led me to write it. I’m a shy and reserved person, so you would never expect that I would do this. But from the first week after my husband left – and you’ll find that I say husband when I’m talking about that period, and then later I’ll say ex-husband – he said that we should say that the separation was amicable. I had this full-bodied knowing that I could not lie about what was happening to me, even if it was a more flattering story. I knew that the only way I would get through it was to be honest about it. When I would run into people, they would say, “How are you doing?” and because it was the time of COVID, and people were coming back to Martha’s Vineyard, I would say, “I’m not well. He left me, and I’m in agony.” Part of my coming back to life was writing.
And that happened in different stages, working on my legal cases, and then eventually writing a column for Modern Love [in the New York Times]. I was a writer when I was young, and that got reawakened and was part of my recovery. But I would say the biggest reason why I wrote this book is that I have a generational legacy in my family of male infidelity and no one ever talked about it. I was taught by example that to be a good woman, to be a graceful woman, that you don’t talk about these things, that you clean them up, that you protect the man, that you protect the man’s reputation. And I thought I had changed that legacy by marrying someone who’s not a public figure, who was very mild mannered, seemed very calm and kind, but I had repeated it, and I really wrestled with – why do the women in my family attract this, and how do I change that?
At the same time that I was being open and honest, I landed on that the only way to change that for my children is to actually tell the story. It’s possible to tell your story without being mean and vindictive and vengeful, which is how we’re characterized. And I wanted to write something that was true and honest and explored a lot of these themes that come up around a divorce like this, without sort of building a piece against my ex. So I want to talk a little bit about repeating patterns unwittingly. Because I do believe that there are a number of people who would say, how didn’t you know and how could you not see this?
Royce: How do we do that when we think we’re doing everything differently [from our parents]?
Burden: It really came as such a shock to me. I thought I had married absolutely the opposite. My husband would go to bed at 9 p.m. He worked all the time. He was not a flirtatious person. And then it happened. His teenage years were a little more rebellious. And I tried to find the signs that it would lead to this as I looked back on it. Hindsight is 2020, right? If I was celebrating my fiftieth wedding anniversary, we’d be saying, “there are no bad signs in this marriage. It all turned out so well.” But if it ends like ours did, it’s easy to go back and say, oh, there’s this. There was something that happened in my case that was extremely unsettling to me. Other people tend to assume it was a horrible marriage. They’d say, you must have been unhappy and you’re better off without him. So the entirety of a marriage is recharacterized when it ends in divorce. And there were times I thought, If only he had died, I would feel better about all this, not just the rejection, but also other people’s assumptions.
Royce: Will you talk a little bit about that?
Burden: That was really hard for me, and that was really hard for my kids. Our story became, after twenty years of marriage, and three children, it became only about the ending. Only about this horrible ending, and that’s another reason why I wrote the book, is that I wanted to recreate our love story, our happy years as a family. I believe, to this day, that we were very happy for a long period of time, and I didn’t want that to be gone for my kids. I want that to be true. I believe that can be true, and it ended badly. And I think the other thing that was hard in that reaction is that it assumes that the day he left, that I stopped loving him. I was like, “What a jerk,” but I was still in love with him. Even though he was not treating me well, it took me a very long time to fall out of love with him, and that was really painful. Also, when I would try to explain we didn’t have a marriage with a lot of conflict, people didn’t really buy that, and that was hard for me.
Royce: Please tell your story, because it was the tipping point when it happened. You’re on Martha’s Vineyard and you get the phone call.
Burden: I will say, my ex bought a very expensive Sleep Number mattress in January, where you can adjust it for each of you. He liked his side soft, I like it very hard. We had to get our doormen to put it in. It was such an investment in time and money. That was January, and he left in March.
Royce: So we should beware of gifts. Watch out ladies.
Burden: So yes, it was the second week of COVID lockdown. I think we all remember that week in March. It was very scary. We didn’t know how long it would last. We didn’t know when we would get a vaccine. We moved to our house in Martha’s Vineyard, which was isolated. It was our favorite place. We had a very cozy week, even though it was such a strange time. My husband was chopping wood and building fires. I was cooking, he was cooking, and one night after dinner, I was mopping the floor, and I got a call on my cell phone. It went to voicemail because I didn’t recognize the number, and then I played it, and it was a man saying, “I’m trying to reach Belle. I’m sorry to tell you this, but your husband is having an affair with my wife.” And at first I thought, this has to be a mistake. And then I thought, no, he said my name. And that night, my husband was very apologetic. He said, “It only lasted a couple of weeks, it was a mistake, I love you and only you.” And then by the morning, he came into our bedroom, fully dressed, with a bag packed, and said, “I thought I wanted this life, but I don’t. I thought I was happy, but I’m not, and I want a divorce, and I’m leaving right now.” And he walked out the door, didn’t even wait for my response, got in his Jeep and got on a ferry, and left the island. And from that moment, and actually the moment he walked into our bedroom, his whole affect had changed. It had gone icy. The eyes were different. It was like this was a totally different person, and it was so cold, and the coldness continued in the form of just such a lack of empathy. One thing I tried to show in the book is that almost overnight – because I was so shocked and so heartbroken and so upset, and he was so calm – he kept saying, “You’re just so upset, I can’t talk to you” – that you become the unhinged person, even though they’ve done something crazy. I think that’s used against women, that all of a sudden, we become a hysteric.
Royce: Did you ever see the movie Sliding Doors? You know the concept? Do you think, had you not gotten the call, or had you not confronted this at that moment, that everything could have been different? Not that you would want it to now, all these years later, but that it was just by forcing it at the moment that things went the way they went?
Burden: I think that’s absolutely true. And I think COVID was a part of that too. He was looking at a situation where he was going to be stuck in a house with me, where he was going to have to do therapy on Zoom and I think that was an intensifier and probably an accelerator. The only explanation he’s given me is that a switch went off. And the question is, would that switch have gone off if we were not in that particular situation? How long would he have continued an affair? If the husband had not called me, if the husband had not figured it out, I really don’t know.
Royce: My former husband said at the time, “I feel like I am in a room filled with bees, and I will do anything, including jumping through the glass to get out.” I thought, well, that’s a compliment. I think the midlife crisis from having seen my own husband, and other friends’ husbands, or wives have them, too – it is not much different from an adolescent experience. The person changes on a dime, becomes completely unreasonable, and you, in many ways, are the mom, the person who’s confining them, curtailing them. And do you think, given your grandmother’s life, your mother’s life, they withstood the episode and went to something better? Or was it chronic and ongoing?
Burden: It was chronic and ongoing, but I think the men were a bit different because they kept wanting to come back, right? They wanted the lifestyle and to be forgiven and to stay in the relationship. And mine was not like that. He absolutely wanted to bust out. I think that my grandmother, when she died, her heart was broken over it. And I think for her generation, it would have been absolutely impossible to imagine a different life. She was married to a very powerful, dynamic, wealthy man, and it would have been very hard to get out. My mother did end the relationship after a very long time, and that was really hard for her, but I think I noticed the difference immediately when the relationship ended, that she was much stronger and much happier. I never would have left my marriage. If I’d known about the affair, I don’t know if I would have eventually left, but I am much happier now, which still surprises me. I don’t think I ever could have gotten to this place if my marriage hadn’t ended.
Royce: I feel the same way. Creating a marriage is like writing a book. It’s like making a movie. It’s like creating a work of art, a painting, and it’s a collaborative work. You and the other person and the children, you are all part of writing the story. And when one person opts out, I think it’s very hard to grasp onto what’s even happening. I was in the movie business when it happened to me, and I felt like someone had changed the script. I kept saying, “This is not my life.”
Burden: And it’s very terrifying to have the life that you thought were going to have then suddenly disappear. People ask, “Were you just so angry?” And I never really got angry. That was never the dominant emotion. It was sadness. It was heartbreaking. It was so much fear, because I just couldn’t imagine my life going forward, and then I had financial fear as well. And then I think you’re treated differently in your social groups, like all those different pillars come down, and it’s very hard to imagine what’s going to come next.
Royce: I want to talk about money and women and the decisions we make. I think some of these decisions have to do with this idea of two becoming one, and we’re going to delegate and share. I’ll stay home on the farm, and you go out to the field, and it’s in our DNA. I’d like you to talk a little bit about some of the choices you made, and didn’t make, in entering into your marriage.
Burden: He really took charge of our financial life. And I really liked that. It felt like his form of caretaking. He was going out into the world and supporting us, but I also think it was important to his self esteem that he was in charge of that. Over the years, I paid our bills online, but I lost touch with where assets sat, whose names were on what. I signed our tax returns, but I didn’t read our tax returns. And slowly you start to convince yourself. I’m not alone in this. Peers, well educated peers, are in the same boat. You start to convince yourself, you can’t understand it, and they’re better able to understand it. I’m a former corporate lawyer, fully capable of understanding it. Anyone is, but you get very comfortable in the not knowing, like it’s a very luxurious place to be, and all of that came back to haunt me in my divorce. With this book, I’m very happy to talk about this theme, and I’m actually okay being a cautionary tale. What I’m hearing is that it’s really pushing people to talk to their partners about where their assets are, whose name is on what, and even if you’re the most happily married person on earth, to talk about and know what will happen to you if the marriage ends. And having those conversations. If you have a financial advisor, make sure that financial advisor actually speaks to you and not just your husband. I’m seeing the shift, and I’m really happy about that.
We had a traditional division of responsibility. I really wanted to be home with kids. I wanted to be at school pickup. I kept my license and did pro bono work, and he worked all the time. And in our marriage, everything became about his work and his dream and the final goal, and it all moved towards that. And I think when that happens in a marriage, it’s easy to lose sight of your own passions and talents and what you always wanted to be in life. And I think some people take this as a message against staying at home and taking care of kids, which I don’t mean at all. I would not change that, but I think you can have balance in making sure that things shift back to you and to what you want to do with your life.
Royce: Speaking of your children, I want to first talk about your husband’s post marriage behavior vis a vis the children and the effect it’s had on them, because he really distanced.
Burden: He really did. At the time, they were twelve, fifteen and seventeen, and that first day, when he left, he said, you can have custody. I don’t want any custody. And he’s stuck to that. He did not, and he does not, have a bedroom for them. He does not take them on vacations. He hasn’t spent a night with them since he left. It is not the case of someone moving around the globe, and starting another family, never hearing from them again. He lives near us. He’s in touch with them. He’s very kind and sweet with them, but he does not do daily parenting of waiting for curfew or applying to college or school breaks. He signed off on that. He said they’re fully formed human beings, and that has been the hardest part of this. This is a finite period for me. This is their dad for life. It has been painful for them, but the way I tried to talk to them about it is, for some reason that I don’t understand, your dad cannot make a home for you right now. He doesn’t have pots and pans as he’s just not able to do it. And that is about him. That’s not about you. And that to them was better for me to acknowledge their reality, rather than saying this is normal, this is fine, and they’re amazing now. They’re 18, 21, and 23 and they’re very sweet and supportive of their dad. They understand his limitations, and they try to see him in ways that make him comfortable, like going to a hockey game or his favorite restaurant, but it’s limited.
Royce: What do you think the effect of your writing the book and speaking so candidly about all of this has had on your children?
Burden: You know time will tell, but I think they’re really proud of me. Nothing in the book is a surprise to them. They lived through this. What’s amazing to me is I hear from so many people around the world right now, particularly women. And I also hear it from children, who are adults now, and sometimes teenagers, who’ve read the book and they reassure me that this is the right thing to do, to be so honest about it. Often parents just try to act like nothing happened, and there’s this mystery, like dad left, but I don’t know why. And, was mom okay? And my hope is that by having this text, that it will serve them well. But it’s the hardest part of this, because I’m conscious every day of how complicated this is for them to have this book out in the world.
Royce: I think you’ve written a very worthy book. I think there is profound worth in what you’ve done, because you have put a voice to something that many people go through. It is deeply mystifying and disturbing and painful, and we all patch it together and go on. As you can tell by the success of the book, you’ve struck a deep chord of something that people needed to hear.
Burden: When it happened to me, I really felt like I was the only person that it had happened to. And it’s just astonishing to me, that this happened to you and that it happened to other people in the audience. I think we’d all be better off if we shared these stories and made these connections with each other and made each other feel less alone. I think we’re taught in our culture to really stay quiet about this stuff. It doesn’t serve us.
