Hello, I'm Melissa Adwarnie, and you're listening to NPR's Book of the Day. In Strangers,

a memoir of marriage, The Truth reads like fiction. In the story, author Bell Burden writes about her

husband walking out of their 20-year marriage, saying he no longer wanted to be in a relationship

or have custody of their three children.

Burden talks with all things considered host, Juana Summers,

about how she continued to live and cope and also parent in the aftermath.

Have you ever had that experience, no matter who you talk to, your mom, your friend, your coworker, they're all telling you you've just got to read this book. Right now, for me at least, that book is Strangers, a memoir of marriage by Bell Burden. This book absolutely hooked me. I tore through it in a little over a day. It recounts Burden's husband checking out of the couple's 20-year marriage at the beginning of the pandemic.

Don't just take my word for it, though. The book is in its ninth printing, and Netflix won an intense bidding war to grab the screen rights. Gwyneth Paltrow will executive produce and star as Burton. And the real Bell Burton joins me now to talk about her book and the response to it. Welcome to All Things Considered. Thank you so much,

Juan. I'm so happy to be here. Okay, there's so much I want to ask you. I've got to start with this. When you were writing this book and publishing it, could you have ever imagined that it would get this kind of a response? I really didn't. I thought it would be a very quiet book that maybe women gave to each other when they were going through a divorce. I did not get any of those famous book clubs. So I thought, really, this is going to be a wonderful accomplishment for

me, but maybe not many people would read it. Let's just take a couple minutes, if we can, to walk through

some of your story. As I mentioned, your husband walked out of your marriage

after 20 years. This was during the second week of the COVID lockdown in March 2020.

I just want you to fill in some of the blanks for us, because I mean, that's really only scratching the surface of what happened.

Yes, so this happened during the second week of COVID lockdown. We're at our house in Martha's Vineyard, and my husband and I were having a pretty cozy time there.

He was chopping wood and cooking dinner.

Our two daughters were there with us.

And then one night I got a phone call.

I didn't answer it because I didn't recognize the number.

And I played the message, and it was a man saying, I'm sorry to tell you

this, but your husband is having an affair with my wife. And I was completely shocked. I thought I was

very happily married. I was very much in love with my husband. We did not have a lot of discord.

And initially, he tried to downplay it, but by the next morning,

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