Ospreys Can Be Awkward
The Slim Keith and C. Z. Guest of newsletters throws itself into Belle’s burden, a Gawker postmortem, and Kate Manne’s latest nervy proclamation.
Welcome to Spreadlandia, where two veteran editors read it ALL to winnow out only the best: juicy yarns, big ideas, deeply personal essays, and hot goss—aka, the full Spread. Plus: original interviews, podcasts, and more. Come hungry!
Spreadmates,
On Saturday morning, we needed A MINUTE. And so, like all self-respecting mothers who need a minute, we made an announcement to our families perhaps a little too enthusiastically: We needed to use the bathroom! In truth, we needed an emergency reading chamber. The New Yorker’s Jessica Winter had published a piece on Strangers author Belle Burden. The headline alone told us this was a five-alarm Spreadmergency. Had the socialite-turned-memoirist been less than forthcoming about the money involved in the dissolution of her marriage—a marriage to a man so cold we have at times wondered if he was an actual sociopath—that is the subject of her super-duper-bestselling, group-text-sweeping account of financial peril?
Apparently we weren’t the only ones locked in the bathroom: The online reaction to Winter’s piece was swift and ferocious. Some of our favorite women on the internet were mad as hell. Winter missed the point of the book altogether, they said. Pawing through Burden’s financial documents to verify her side of the story? Mean-spirited and misogynist. Why were women being attacked for sharing their truth? And who says Belle Burden owes the world every last decimal on her tax return, anyway? (Firestarter Caitlin Flanagan, on the other hand: “I knew the husband was going to get his side of the story.”)
For those late to the Belle ball, there’s a lot going on here: Despite a belabored metaphor about a family of ospreys also nesting on Martha’s Vineyard, Strangers struck a chord with readers for its emotional honesty—a good faith that is at least in part earned by Burden’s seeming frankness about her Standard Oil + Cornelius Vanderbilt privileged upbringing. The matter-of-fact register in which she describes her country-club circumstances seems like a breath of fresh air, especially in the wake of Amy Griffin’s less-than-forthright description of her own pedigree (among other things!) in last year’s super-duper-bestselling memoir, The Tell. (Supplemental reading: Maris Kreizman’s “The Rise of Ragebait Lit,” out in Bazaar yesterday.)
But the thing that really makes Burden’s memoir stand out among the dozens of other personal tales of divorce published these past few years is how deeply it focuses on the finances in particular. That, plus a clever narrative trick: Burden drops the bomb on us (that her husband dropped on her) at the beginning of the book. After twenty years of marriage, he’s abandoning her and their children. Boom, done deal. Except there’s a prenup—and it’s missing, and her future hinges on it. As Burden retraces her marriage, looking for clues as to why and how he could have done this, the book’s momentum is propelled by that money mystery: Where is the prenup, will it be found, what havoc will it wreak? Will he follow it to the letter, forcing Belle and her children to move from their home (a prospect that is legitimately destabilizing, even if the next home, too, is all Schumacher upholstery and Maestro Bath faucets)? The book works so well because Burden is both a skilled writer and ostensibly willing to give up the goods, describing in detail her many trusts, and how she’s used them to buy properties that she then (foolishly) put in both of their names. It reads as if she’s giving us the whole enchilada.
But some of the numbers Winter delivers—that Belle did not—would make a gecko blink: In the divorce settlement, Burden got $50,000 per month in child support (which does not include the kids’ education, insurance, or other programmatic expenses); she’s the beneficiary of five trusts, some of which she receives hundreds of thousands from annually, but the bulk of which—to the tune of $45 million—will be accessible to her once her stepmother dies. Of course, this is none of our business. Except she made it our business by establishing the posture of an open book.
Did Burden do anything wrong? Is eliding some context wrong? Nah. But when your memoir is structured as a financial thriller, its hat hung on a kind of exotic one-percent transparency, we’re going to stick our neck out and say: It’s awkward.
Rachel & Maggie
P.S. In our preorders: New novels coming up next week from Ann Patchett and Maggie O’Farrell, and later this summer: Kathryn Jezer-Morton’s examination of social media’s affect on families, The Story of Your Life.
Two sides sides to every story (even divorce stories).
Is the Burden effect making a very un-Atlantic-y essay the most-read story on the Atlantic site? Those looking for a man to finally take some responsibility for the role he plays in a marital dy-nam-ic may find some satisfaction in Chris Jones’s divorce essay (adapted from his forthcoming memoir, Legs Hearts Minds), a sort of reverse-Strangers in which the spouse being crushed by a plummeting anvil is a man (but, don’t worry, the one at fault is still… a man). Jones recounts the terrible night, a decade ago, when he got clonked on the head by the dual realization that his marriage was over and his best friend was colluding (not sleeping) with the enemy, just months after he lost a plum gig at Esquire. The twist: Jones emerges from this triple whammy not full of rage, but rather newly aware that his rage—and tendency to view everything in life as a competition—was the problem in the first place. File under “I’m the problem it’s me,” next to Daniel Oppenheimer’s essay in the New York Times Magazine about no-bullshit therapy for manly man men.
Read “The Night My Marriage Fell Apart” here.
We thought “catching print” was about magazines!
Seems like every week we bring you another tale about how men are beginning to face the kind of aesthetic pressure that women have been under since the dawn of time—and how they’re crumbling to absolute bits under the weight of it all. It’s possible that in all our talk of looksmaxxing and peptides and longevity and testosterone shots, we’ve been burying the lede when the real issue is, same as it ever was, penis size. Cue Brock Colyar, breezing in with a comprehensive but also—true to form—empathetic look at an anxiety that afflicts Roganites and Fire Island boys alike. We’re going all the way here, folks: the reality of the micropenis (rare!), online Viagra prescriptions (rampant!), porn addiction (which is, after all, the only place straight men actually see other men’s junk, leading to their, ahem, inflated expectations). We’re talkin’ ligament-cutting procedures, the burgeoning dermatological field of “girth enhancement,” the across-the-aisle trend of ridiculing men based on their size, and—this one hit home—the freedom women feel to rate and LOL about less-endowed partners. We can’t joke about a woman being a “dog” anymore, so why are we allowed to giggle at a guy’s “tiny porcini mushroom”? Catching print, btw, is “the art of assessing a man’s penis size through his pants.”
Read “The Big Little Penis Panic” here.
“Death by FOMO is a pretty depressing epitaph.”
Two years ago, Peggy Orenstein wrote an opinion piece for the New York Times about the “teen sex trend” colloquially described as choking. The practice was rampant and dangerous, she explained, and the culprit was—of course—porn. One of your Spreaditors literally wept after reading it, for the children and for all of us, and we have yet to watch a single episode of Euphoria, you know, just in case. Now, the Spread’s philosopher queen Kate Manne is doing a Home Edit on our psyches—organizing our big feelings with her brilliant, methodical brain. In “How Sex-Positivity Lost Its Way” over on More to Hate, she calls “choking” what it is—strangulation—and writes about the perceived tension between what’s consensual and what’s ethical, and how consent and misogyny are not mutually exclusive. This is a woman unafraid to go out on a limb, and we will join her there: “Some practices are just too unhealthy for our bodies, and others for our minds, representing a troubling symptom of misogynistic enculturation. And some are plausibly both: strangulation is an act which cuts off the oxygen and blood supplies to a woman’s brain, and simultaneously robs her of her voice. Indeed, strangulation is the ultimate act of male control and domination.”
Read it here.
Paid subscribers are scrambling over this paywall to find a tale of gambling addiction; twin rants from our favorite op-ed writer (keywords: mama grizzlies); the sure-fire T.V. hit that Tim Cook is denying us all; and a look into our Spreaditor future… catch you on the flip side!
