Nope. Maybe this memoir would’ve worked in 2013, lining up with Lean In as an ode to elite feminism. But in 2026, we’re past this, right?
It’s a book about how an unbelievably wealthy heiress married a future hedge fund manager, stayed married 29 years and had three children, and faced an acrimonious, sudden divorce. The husband’s behavior is cold and shocking but we don’t learn much more about him otherwise, how he was in the marriage, what their relationship was really like. It starts on the cusp of the breakup and ends at the publishing of her essay in Modern Love.
What could make this book work would be real honesty: not just alluding to a ‘lucky’ upbringing, but maybe even discussing the fact that, as someone worth somewhere around sixty-three million dollars, her financial worries are maybe a tad overplayed. Maybe that makes her unrelatable to most people? There just isn’t much real introspection here, not a moment when she seriously questions her own judgment, innocence, or victimhood. I don’t think she’s a bad person, but the degree to which she portrays herself as, in the internet parlance, a ‘smol bean’ is out of wack with her actual means. As the linked New Yorker piece covers, the degree to which she downplays her wealth and dials up the threat seems pretty dishonest to me. She makes a big plot point of keeping their two houses, writing that she could have lost both – but that basically was never a real possibility.
Men are bad, but the elitism dripping from this whole thing is hard to look past. Belle Burden (descendent of the Vanderbilts, etc, etc, follow the links on her Wikipedia) writes this book, gets interviewed by Drew Barrymore of the Drew family and the Barrymore family. The book is optioned as a film starring Gwyneth Paltrow, another Wikipedia page with bright blue links in the “Parents” section. It’s just the multi-generationally ultra-wealthy talking to each other.
Had it focused on the emotional toll, maybe it would have been more readable. But as it is, this is pretty dishonest, the stakes are artificial, and it doesn’t really develop more than a thin portrait of any of the people involved, including the author.