Gretchen Falk is privileged and doesn’t care who knows it. The socialite protagonist of “Someone Else’s Husband” lies to police about her husband’s need for medication and literally stamps her feet when she can’t take him home from the New York City precinct where he is being questioned as a potential murder suspect.
By this point, she has already called her Park Avenue life with Richard “as close to perfect as one could reasonably get.” Except, of course, it never really was. As Kimberly McCreight’s twisty murder mystery unfolds we learn more about Gretchen’s snooty upbringing, Richard’s rough childhood and her willful ignorance about her children’s problems. Frankie, a vibrant artist that Richard befriended on a Mt. Kilimanjaro hike with his Dartmouth buddies, serves as secondary narrator, and is dealing with her own past sexual trauma; various friends and family fill out the tale.
The story’s basic contours may seem familiar to viewers of prestige TV adaptations of books such as “Big Little Lies” and “The Perfect Couple.” “Someone Else’s Husband” also made me think of another literary socialite: Belle Burden. I had been avoiding her bestselling memoir about the sudden rupture of her outwardly perfect marriage but decided to read “Strangers” to compare the stories Gretchen and Burden told themselves about their marriages — one fictional and one very human.
‘Strangers’ dangers
Where fictional Gretchen is imperious, real Burden is timid and careful about appearances, compliant by nature. I found some of her behavior exasperating, but the book has clearly struck a chord with many women; a recent New Yorker story about apparent financial omissions in “Strangers” prompted a heated backlash from her supporters.
Her husband’s behavior was deplorable, no question about it: The day after his affair with another woman was exposed early in COVID lockdown, he walked away from their 20-year union and day-to-day parenting of their three children. Most galling to Burden: No matter how much she presses him about his decision to leave, he can’t or won’t give her a satisfactory explanation.
Financial ignorance is not bliss
So she replays their courtship and marriage for clues to its eventual demise she might have missed. One thing she didn’t do: protect herself financially. We learn that the Harvard grad with a NYU law degree, descended from the wealthy Vanderbilt family and famed socialite Babe Paley, didn’t read the joint tax returns she signed, so had no idea how much money her husband (called James in the book) was earning as a hedge fund executive. Earlier in their marriage, she financed two residences with her own trust funds and added him to the title, thereby entitling him to half of them under the terms of the prenup her family attorney advised her not to sign. Under it, Burden was not legally entitled to any monies her spouse earned while she was taking care of their children.
Surprising no one who has ever been involved in a messy estate battle, her husband’s attorney does make a play for his share of both properties during divorce proceedings. The very prospect of it sends Burden into an emotional tailspin. “I could not afford to buy James out of either home,” she flatly writes. “I would have to sell both.”
Here, we’ll have to take her word for it. As the New Yorker’s reporting indicates, Burden has a sizable inheritance, though she won’t have access to some of it until her stepmother dies. Her rep told the publication keeping either the New York City apartment or Martha’s Vineyard home would have been “neither feasible nor financially responsible.”
No emotion spared
Ultimately, the attorney drops the claim. But we don’t get to that revelation until Burden has spent page after page outlining her distress at the prospect of losing her homes; she describes her attempts to lobby his male friends to intercede on her behalf and outrage when mutual friends socialize with him while their homes hang in the balance. “Strangers” began as a Modern Love column for the New York Times that Burden expanded to a full-length book. Where the original essay was necessarily compact, “Strangers” plumbs the author’s fragile emotions in exhaustive detail.
You can be sympathetic to Burden’s plight while also wondering whether you’re getting the full picture about what was really going on at various moments. In “Someone Else’s Husband,” the reader learns that Gretchen isn’t the most reliable narrator, and it seems at times like the same might be said of Burden. Or maybe she just has tunnel vision about a very fraught period in her life.
It’s a process
Whatever the case, I bristled at the way she portrayed her editor’s very reasonable disclosure that the New York Times would give her ex a chance to respond to her Modern Love essay before publication.
“When the editor first contacted me, he told me that James would receive a fact-check call. I hadn’t understood that he would need to approve the piece as a whole, or I had missed it, this critical step in the process,” she writes.
Except getting his reaction is not the same thing as seeking his approval — a distinction it might seem a trained lawyer could appreciate.
“Showing him the essay and considering his response would be the beginning of the process, not the end,” the editor tells Burden after she suggests the paper’s protocol would silence many women.
Again, that’s a reasonable response from a journalist point of view. But Burden felt doubted and proceeds to theorize that her ex would object to being written about and the Times would drop the piece. “They would not risk a lawsuit, especially when the subject was a wealthy man, a former lawyer,” she writes. So she sat on it for a spell.
In the end, she sent it to her ex. His anti-climactic response: “Your article is good, sad, hard to read, I’m supportive.”
No pity, please
Fictional Gretchen isn’t nearly as deferential to men or women; she doesn’t worry about seeming sweet and feminine — or likeable. And she flat out rejects the notion she should be pitied when cops come knocking on their door, search warrant in hand. “I can take care of myself!” she silently rages early on. “You have no idea what I’m capable of!”
By the end of “Someone Else’s Husband,” we have a clearer picture of what that might be. Gretchen is snobby, and her behavior can be maddening, but she’s far more interesting a narrator to me. It helps that we don’t have to solely rely on her interpretation of events; Gretchen’s family and friends challenge her views, while Frankie has her own perspective on events. In “Strangers,” we just have Burden’s take.
Fans of either book can look forward to a potential Hollywood adaptation. McCreight is co-writing an adaptation of “Someone Else’s Husband” for Lionsgate TV and 3Arts, while Netflix has optioned a film adaptation of “Strangers” with Gwyneth Paltrow set to star and executive produce; Heidi Schreck, the playwright who wrote the Tony Award-nominated play “What the Constitution Means to Me,” has inked a deal to pen the script.
Given the healthy appetite for stories about rich women whose supposedly perfect marriages are unexpectedly turned upside down overnight, we can surely expect more book to screen adaptations to follow.
“Someone Else’s Husband” by Kimberly McCreight, Knopf, available now
“Strangers” by Belle Burden, Dial Press, available now
Originally published on my Lititude substack