Belle Burden, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage, has joined the Penguin Random House Speakers Bureau, where her profile now carries the bureau’s “New Speakers” designation alongside categories including Bestselling Author Speakers and Women’s Rights and Advocacy. Strangers is “a riveting memoir that examines the hidden complexities and power dynamics of marriage and divorce.”
Belle Burden’s Strangers Became a #1 Bestseller
Strangers traces the end of Burden’s 20-year marriage during the early days of the pandemic, when her husband “abruptly left without explanation.” Burden first wrote about the experience in “Was I Married to a Stranger?”, an essay for the Modern Love column in The New York Times that became “one of the most viewed Modern Love pieces in 2023.” The memoir expands that account into “the fragile architecture of relationships and the quiet compromises women are often taught to make in the name of love.”
Strangers debuted at #1 on the New York Times bestseller list. In an Editors’ Choice designation, The New York Times wrote that the memoir “reads like a love story and a horror story and, in one nail-biting section, like a financial thriller.” Joyce Carol Oates called it “riveting” and “a beautifully written eulogy.” Graydon Carter described it as “a beautifully written, instant classic.” Lori Gottlieb asks, “Can we see the invisible fault lines in a marriage or truly know the people closest to us?” W magazine wrote that the book “examines how we view intimacy, how the people closest to us can change without us knowing, and how to move forward in the wake of devastation.” Kirkus Reviews called Burden’s account “a measured, empathetic, and modern response to an enraging callousness.”
Netflix acquired the rights to Strangers for a feature film starring Gwyneth Paltrow, who is slated to both star in and executive produce the adaptation. Heidi Schreck is writing the screenplay, and Stacey Sher is producing.
What Belle Burden Will Bring to the Stage
Through the Speakers Bureau, Burden offers two programs. “In Conversation with Belle Burden” draws on Strangers to address trust, self-worth, and “the courage required to rebuild a life after profound loss.” A second program, “Reinvention in Midlife,” centers on Burden’s experience starting over at 50 and asking, “Who am I on my own?” The talk examines what followed the sudden end of her marriage: navigating friendships and social circles altered by divorce, parenting alone, and learning to inhabit every role in her family at once.
Belle Burden practices law alongside her writing. She is an attorney specializing in juvenile immigration cases and a graduate of Phillips Exeter Academy, Harvard College, and New York University School of Law. She lives in New York City with her three children.
Belle Burden Joins a Roster of Bestselling Authors
The Penguin Random House Speakers Bureau represents authors including Ta-Nehisi Coates, Dr. Ibram X. Kendi, Cheryl Strayed, Isabel Wilkerson, and Colson Whitehead, and serves corporations, colleges and universities, libraries, nonprofits, and conferences, in virtual and in-person formats. Belle Burden, who travels from New York, NY, now joins that roster, and organizations can request her directly through the bureau.
The conversations ahead center on reclaiming independence as essential to self-determination, extending the questions Strangers raised on the page into rooms where audiences can now respond to them directly.
