A divorce, a fortune and a bestseller: The memoir everyone is arguing about

Back in the 1980s, Australian writer Clive James wrote a rollicking series of stories from his youth called Unreliable Memoirs. American humorist P. J. O’Rourke wrote of these bestsellers, “Honesty comes in various types and the best is exaggeration ... Clive exaggerates to wonderfully honest effect.”

Fast forward to our own times, and any memoir deemed unreliable is soon at the end of an investigative hatchet job. Take Belle Burden’s runaway bestseller memoir Strangers, about a tragedy that is both ordinary and extraordinary.

Ordinary, because it’s the all-too-frequent tale of a woman whose husband walks out on her and their children after 20 years of what she believed was a happy marriage. A Boston Globe review described it as a “brutally resonant, clear-eyed portrait that strikes universal chords”.

What exactly did happen to her? Writer Jessica Winter decided to follow the money. Her article in the New Yorker is a forensic investigation of the book, the publicity trail, expert opinion and the court documents around the couple’s divorce. It goes into eye-watering detail, but the conclusion is that Burden was never going to lose her two homes for herself and her children, as she feared, and that she was always financially secure.

So, is Strangers an unreliable memoir? Not everyone feels the take-down is deserved. New York Magazine columnist Emily Gould has leapt to Burden’s defence. She says Winter’s article “hinges on a narrow reading of the text and a cherry-picked selection of quotes” and she asks, “Does knowing that Burden has a great deal of money coming to her, none of which was accessible during the time period she describes in the book, really complicate the narrative all that much?”

Other bestselling memoirs where the story has been questioned have suffered. When an Observer investigation last year cast doubt over key aspects of Raynor Winn’s 2018 blockbuster The Salt Path, publisher Penguin Michael Joseph delayed publication of Winn’s next book, On Winter Hill.

Like Burden, Winn has stood by her story, a moving and redemptive tale of a marathon walk around south-west England after she and her husband Moth had been left destitute and homeless. The Observer has continued to investigate and more apparent discrepancies have arisen. Perhaps the most disturbing was the doubt cast by some medical experts on whether Moth was indeed suffering from a terminal illness, as the book claims.

The most notorious unreliable memoir is James Frey’s 2003 book A Million Little Pieces. Oprah Winfrey branded Frey a fraud on her TV show for his mix of truth, e