Belle Burden, the attorney turned memoirist behind Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage, sat down with novelist Elin Hilderbrand for a conversation about marriage, memory and the difficulty of telling a true story out loud. Recorded live at the 15th annual Nantucket Book Festival in June, the exchange was released June 30 as an episode of Hilderbrand’s podcast, Books, Beach & Beyond, which she co-hosts with Tim Ehrenberg.
Hilderbrand, the bestselling author of more than 30 books including Swan Song and Five Star Weekend, opened the conversation by telling Burden she had designed their conversation in three parts: Burden’s life before Strangers was published, the book itself, and what has happened since. Ehrenberg noted on the podcast that the show has featured only one other memoirist across its four seasons, Ina Garten. It was a detail that set Burden’s appearance apart from the novelists who typically fill the guest chair.
A Writer Who Stopped, and Started Again
Much of the episode’s opening stretch traced how Burden became a writer twice: once as a teenager, and again more than three decades later. She told Hilderbrand that a fellow student’s blunt dismissal of her work in a college writing workshop convinced her she had no talent. So she stopped keeping a journal and set writing aside for what she called on the podcast her “30-year diversion into a legal life.” “The problem in that whole story is not that he said it,” Burden said. “It’s that I believed him.”
She did not write in any sustained way again until after her divorce was final, when she began putting down what had happened in her own words rather than let other people’s versions stand. That writing became the Modern Love essay “Was I Married to a Stranger?” published in The New York Times on June 30, 2023, and later the basis for Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage, published by The Dial Press on Jan. 13, 2026.
Marriage, Identity and What the Book Leaves Out
Hilderbrand asked Burden directly about the choices that shaped both her marriage and her memoir. Among them: a prenuptial agreement altered days before her wedding, and the divorce proceedings that later turned on it. Burden also described her editing process, saying she cut material about her ex-husband that risked reading as a case built against him rather than a fair account. “It became more even-handed,” she said. “The equilibrium was better. It became more fair.”
The conversation’s closing stretch turned to identity after the marriage ended. Asked where she stands on forgiveness, Burden said she has stopped tying her sense of peace to an apology she has never received. “I made a vow to myself when I signed my divorce agreement, I am not going to live in this,” she said. Burden also described what happened when Strangers went out to celebrity book clubs before publication. “When we sent the book out to the book clubs, like the big Oprah, Jenna, Reese, they all turned it down. Good Morning America, they all turned it down,” she said. The concern, she said, was that the memoir did not have a happy ending, because it does not close with her finding someone new. “This is a happy ending,” she said. “The whole thing is a happy ending.” Hilderbrand told Burden that ending was “almost my favorite part of the book,” calling it proof that “women can find themselves and be happy by themselves.”
Two Authors, One Emotionally Direct Conversation
The pairing put a novelist with one of publishing’s most consistent bestselling records opposite a memoirist whose debut had just matched that kind of reach. The Rumpus has praised Strangers for its “vulnerable and compassionate storytelling,” language that sits comfortably beside Hilderbrand’s own reputation for fiction built around close, character-driven relationships.
Burden also discussed what has happened since Strangers debuted at #1 on the New York Times bestseller list. That includes a trip to Maui to be interviewed by Oprah, and a steady volume of readers who have recognized their own marriages in hers. “It’s just been astonishing, the number of people who have reached out to me that this exact same thing happened to them,” she said.
She and Hilderbrand also touched on the memoir’s path to the screen. Strangers is in development as a Netflix feature starring Gwyneth Paltrow, with Heidi Schreck attached to write the screenplay. Burden said she and Paltrow, who attended the same New York grade school years apart, connected over Zoom before Paltrow signed on. She called the actress “very thoughtful about the book.”