YouSaid · the spoken record

Belle Burden

lines on the record: 83
first: 2026-03-31
most recent: 2026-03-31
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“But I have always seen the purpose in it. I've always imagined that one reader who's going through it, who feels very alone, and that this might reach them. And I just am so excited and proud that I took each step and that I was able to write this and get it published and that it's now out there in the world. Yes.”
2026-03-31 · The Oprah Podcast · Oprah with Belle Burden on the Collapse of Her 20 Year Marriage & Her Bestselling Memoir · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I am. I am. I'm really, I can't quite believe it, actually. I can't quite believe that I have announced now to the entire world that my husband left me, that this is now imprint everywhere. It's kind of an embarrassing story.”
2026-03-31 · The Oprah Podcast · Oprah with Belle Burden on the Collapse of Her 20 Year Marriage & Her Bestselling Memoir · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We will both go to the graduation. Very important to her that he be there. So there's no anger, and it's cordial, but it is not close, and I don't think it will ever be close.”
2026-03-31 · The Oprah Podcast · Oprah with Belle Burden on the Collapse of Her 20 Year Marriage & Her Bestselling Memoir · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It is cordial. We will communicate with, he sent me the flood insurance bill that he received for the house, or we will communicate about my youngest graduation, which is in May.”
2026-03-31 · The Oprah Podcast · Oprah with Belle Burden on the Collapse of Her 20 Year Marriage & Her Bestselling Memoir · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But I think that what I hope I've done, which felt really important to me, is to recreate what he was as a father during all those years and all the wonderful things that he did with them. Because when it ends the way minded, all of that kind of gets erased. For me and for kids, and for him. And I wanted that. But he was there recording the wood.”
2026-03-31 · The Oprah Podcast · Oprah with Belle Burden on the Collapse of Her 20 Year Marriage & Her Bestselling Memoir · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think they're very proud of me. And they're also very loving and supportive of their dad. So it's like they have both things.”
2026-03-31 · The Oprah Podcast · Oprah with Belle Burden on the Collapse of Her 20 Year Marriage & Her Bestselling Memoir · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They're funny. I printed it and put it on my desk, and I said, come read it whenever you want to. And it sat there for three weeks. And then I found my girls reading it in bed. And then it was on the floor. I think kids just don't take it as seriously as we all do. Yeah.”
2026-03-31 · The Oprah Podcast · Oprah with Belle Burden on the Collapse of Her 20 Year Marriage & Her Bestselling Memoir · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was actually happy that he responded. There's been so much silence that I was glad that he spoke up, said something. And I don't disagree with some of it. I think that he has been always loving with them. And they've been loving and supportive of him. And I'm glad for that. I'm really grateful for that. That they have that kind of rapport. But I don't think I mischaracterized him in the book, either during the marriage or after the marriage. I was very, very careful with my words because I knew my children would be reading this. And what I”
2026-03-31 · The Oprah Podcast · Oprah with Belle Burden on the Collapse of Her 20 Year Marriage & Her Bestselling Memoir · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And where I park it with him is what he said the first day, which was that a switch went off. And that's what I believe. I think a switch went off. There were the whispers over the years on the financial story, but I think I just had to park it somewhere and then move on from it.”
2026-03-31 · The Oprah Podcast · Oprah with Belle Burden on the Collapse of Her 20 Year Marriage & Her Bestselling Memoir · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's very hard. It's very hard to move beyond it when you don't have that kind of neat wrapping up. And an apology would have done it too, or an acknowledgement would have done it too. But I didn't get the explanation. I did not get the acknowledgement either of the pain that he had caused. So I think the only thing that worked was really just moving it to the side and really focusing on the type of work I wanted to do, the things like my legal cases, and having sort of that existential peace with a vacuum of knowing, you know, just sort of like parking it somewhere in my head.”
2026-03-31 · The Oprah Podcast · Oprah with Belle Burden on the Collapse of Her 20 Year Marriage & Her Bestselling Memoir · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I believe women who are not working taking care of kids have meaningful work in other ways. But when there is this family enterprise that you're supporting, I do think that's a huge contribution and that it should have been acknowledged in the divorce”
2026-03-31 · The Oprah Podcast · Oprah with Belle Burden on the Collapse of Her 20 Year Marriage & Her Bestselling Memoir · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think a couple of reasons, I think, with three kids and the chaos of family that can happen. But I think in our situation, his career became so dominant. It was like the family enterprise and everything moved towards that. And that was why he missed parent-teacher conferences and couldn't go to the birthday party on the weekend. And I think when that happens, it is very easy for the other parent to really lose sight of that”
2026-03-31 · The Oprah Podcast · Oprah with Belle Burden on the Collapse of Her 20 Year Marriage & Her Bestselling Memoir · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that's exactly right. I think that title really works in that way too, because I had really lost that self-knowledge, I think, in a marriage that I thought was very happy, but I had moved over those 20 years farther and farther away from what I believe were my passions and talents and a true knowing of myself”
2026-03-31 · The Oprah Podcast · Oprah with Belle Burden on the Collapse of Her 20 Year Marriage & Her Bestselling Memoir · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You wouldn't have done before? No, I would not have. I would have thought, oh God, they're going to make a mess and it's too loud. And I just was a little more brittle. And they just started coming over in droves. I think kids can be sometimes more comfortable when it's just one parent. And they were happy and they were loud and they were toasting things in the kitchen. And it was just so happy and joyful. And I found, I was just so much more relaxed in it. I think because all these things that I had depended on, like these structures had fallen away. I could be more relaxed. I didn't have like this. Tight grip on everything anymore. And I thought, okay, this is a silver lining that I can be like this. And friends notice too. They notice that I was just a little easier, a little like I let things go more easily. You saw that.”
2026-03-31 · The Oprah Podcast · Oprah with Belle Burden on the Collapse of Her 20 Year Marriage & Her Bestselling Memoir · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A number of things had transpired. I was then divorced. I had returned to my maiden name. I was fully in charge of my own finances. I was now starting this life as a writer. And I never would have left my marriage. I never would have thought there was reason to leave my marriage. And I don't think I was self-actualized in my marriage. So it was almost like the universe delivered this to me so that I could end up in this new state, which it's a totally different kind of happiness, a totally different kind of joy, but I would choose this joy again and again.”
2026-03-31 · The Oprah Podcast · Oprah with Belle Burden on the Collapse of Her 20 Year Marriage & Her Bestselling Memoir · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For a long time, I think also almost a year. And I just kept thinking that he must be in pain and sad too. And I don't think he was”
2026-03-31 · The Oprah Podcast · Oprah with Belle Burden on the Collapse of Her 20 Year Marriage & Her Bestselling Memoir · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think it took Definitely took longer than a year. I would say maybe a year and a half. It took a longer time. I think that's really important. It really did. And I think I kept having fantasies that this was some great mistake and that he really regretted it and he was really sad.”
2026-03-31 · The Oprah Podcast · Oprah with Belle Burden on the Collapse of Her 20 Year Marriage & Her Bestselling Memoir · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. Get out. Exactly. And I really was in love with this man. And it took a while. I kept when I would see him at a graduation, it was like my hand wanted to hold his hand. And it took a while for my body to catch up to that.”
2026-03-31 · The Oprah Podcast · Oprah with Belle Burden on the Collapse of Her 20 Year Marriage & Her Bestselling Memoir · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is happening right now, and people assume you do, but I never had a chance to fall out of love with him. I had to do that on my own after he was gone. And that was very painful because I saw.”
2026-03-31 · The Oprah Podcast · Oprah with Belle Burden on the Collapse of Her 20 Year Marriage & Her Bestselling Memoir · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That I was literally walking through the pain. I was feeling every part of it. And that was really good for me. And I think moving my body, that sort of meditation of your feet on the pavement was helpful in kind of getting me just.”
2026-03-31 · The Oprah Podcast · Oprah with Belle Burden on the Collapse of Her 20 Year Marriage & Her Bestselling Memoir · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A friend asked me just to walk like down the driveway. This is when I felt like I couldn't get out of bed, like a weighted blanket was on top of me. And I finally did it. I walked down the driveway and I thought, okay, I can do this. The fresh air feels good. The trees feel good to be in nature. And I went a little bit farther every day. It eventually became an eight mile walk every day. This was COVID, so we had more time. Yeah. And I would go one direction one day in a circle and the other direction the next day. And as I walked, I would rarely run into anybody or see anybody. And I would weep as I walked. And looking back on it, I think.”
2026-03-31 · The Oprah Podcast · Oprah with Belle Burden on the Collapse of Her 20 Year Marriage & Her Bestselling Memoir · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Maybe they may have tried to act that way, but I think he really believed that he, if he said it enough times that everything was fine, that it would be.”
2026-03-31 · The Oprah Podcast · Oprah with Belle Burden on the Collapse of Her 20 Year Marriage & Her Bestselling Memoir · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He's just seen the girls, and the girls have had a really hard time And he looks at me and he says, everything is fine. They are fine. Everything is fine. And again, I did not say anything back because I thought he's not going to give me anything. But I did want to say, what are you talking about? Nothing about this is fine. This has been an emotional trauma for our family.”
2026-03-31 · The Oprah Podcast · Oprah with Belle Burden on the Collapse of Her 20 Year Marriage & Her Bestselling Memoir · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, so this is in May We hadn't seen them since the sandwich. And I thought. He walks by me on the street. I think we're going to have a conversation, something because he's”
2026-03-31 · The Oprah Podcast · Oprah with Belle Burden on the Collapse of Her 20 Year Marriage & Her Bestselling Memoir · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He's always been very kind and sweet with them. He keeps in touch with them by text. They see each other for a dinner, for a hockey game, but he does not do the day-to-day parenting, the emotional stuff, the college applications, the Spanish test that is not. What he has done. He's stuck to that commitment to not being that kind of parent.”
2026-03-31 · The Oprah Podcast · Oprah with Belle Burden on the Collapse of Her 20 Year Marriage & Her Bestselling Memoir · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Household. Household to household. But my youngest was 12. She really wanted a bedroom in his apartment, and that was really painful.”
2026-03-31 · The Oprah Podcast · Oprah with Belle Burden on the Collapse of Her 20 Year Marriage & Her Bestselling Memoir · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that he was a great dad, but he was not, this was not going to be the next part of his life. He also thought it was better for them not to go back and forth.”
2026-03-31 · The Oprah Podcast · Oprah with Belle Burden on the Collapse of Her 20 Year Marriage & Her Bestselling Memoir · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Were you surprised? I was really surprised. He said it the first day when he was leaving, when he was walking out the door that he did not want custody. He said, I could have full custody. And I thought he would change his mind. Yeah. And I'm a child of divorce, and I really believe in joint custody. It's what I would have wanted. So I served up a joint custody agreement 50-50. And it came back blacklined with all of his time taken out.”
2026-03-31 · The Oprah Podcast · Oprah with Belle Burden on the Collapse of Her 20 Year Marriage & Her Bestselling Memoir · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I really wondered are we doing something to attract this? Are we looking for this? Why have I ended up in the same place as my mother and my grandmother? And my grandmother had died when I was nine, but she really was very present during this time that was so dark for me. She was like, it was like she was all around me. Trying to like help me through it.”
2026-03-31 · The Oprah Podcast · Oprah with Belle Burden on the Collapse of Her 20 Year Marriage & Her Bestselling Memoir · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm going to learn from it. And I repeated it in a much more spectacular fashion because their mates actually wanted forgiveness and wanted to come back. Mine did not. Mine was just gone.”
2026-03-31 · The Oprah Podcast · Oprah with Belle Burden on the Collapse of Her 20 Year Marriage & Her Bestselling Memoir · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It felt like protection. But it also, I say this in the book, the flip side of protection is control. Where you're just not, you do not have agency. And one of the great parts of my life now is having that financial agency and not having anyone have any control over me in that way.”
2026-03-31 · The Oprah Podcast · Oprah with Belle Burden on the Collapse of Her 20 Year Marriage & Her Bestselling Memoir · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it was whispering. And there were other things that were whispering in that financial story that I should have paid attention to. There was, you know, he really wanted me to document all of my spending. He would not openly share how he was doing financially.”
2026-03-31 · The Oprah Podcast · Oprah with Belle Burden on the Collapse of Her 20 Year Marriage & Her Bestselling Memoir · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Whatever is earned during the marriage is split, or anything you put in joint name is split. This is what the prenup that my brother signed. It's very standard, but my then fianc ⁇ said first he was very offended by the prenup, and then he asked two weeks before our wedding that the prenup be changed to say that anything earned during the marriage would not be split unless we affirmably chose to put it in joint name. And I trusted his logic. I wanted to please him. My lawyer, who was a great lawyer at a big New York firm, said, do not do this. This is not good for you. You want to be home with kids. He's going into finance. This is not smart. And I convinced him using the arguments that my fianc ⁇ was giving to me. And we changed it. And I knew as he became wealthier and I...”
2026-03-31 · The Oprah Podcast · Oprah with Belle Burden on the Collapse of Her 20 Year Marriage & Her Bestselling Memoir · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because you come from Yes. And my money was in trust. It was protected. And we had a standard prenup that said, whatever you come into the marriage with remains yours.”
2026-03-31 · The Oprah Podcast · Oprah with Belle Burden on the Collapse of Her 20 Year Marriage & Her Bestselling Memoir · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Can you tell us about that? The prenup was a big whisper that I carried with me for the 20 years. It was still whispering to me. It was a very standard prenup that my family wanted me to sign because I had some inherited money.”
2026-03-31 · The Oprah Podcast · Oprah with Belle Burden on the Collapse of Her 20 Year Marriage & Her Bestselling Memoir · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And what I would want, what I ask friends to do is to read your tax returns. Understand where your assets are, whose name is on each thing, and have the conversation or have some understanding about what will happen if the relationship ends, even if you're the most happily married person on earth, you should know what will happen to you if it ends.”
2026-03-31 · The Oprah Podcast · Oprah with Belle Burden on the Collapse of Her 20 Year Marriage & Her Bestselling Memoir · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If my book does one thing, if it makes women pay more attention to their finances and what's going on in their relationship or their marriage financially, I will be so happy because I think I'm not alone in what I did. I handed it over to him in this very trusting, loving way. My father had died two years before, and I was looking for a safe harbor. He said to me, I'm going to take care of you. And it honestly, it felt romantic to me to hand it over to him. He was this man in a gray flannel suit going off to work, and this was how he was going to take care of our family. And as you lose touch with it, Me, I convinced myself that he was better able to handle it, that oh gosh, it actually was very complicated. He made it seem very complicated. It actually isn't. It's not hard to learn this stuff.”
2026-03-31 · The Oprah Podcast · Oprah with Belle Burden on the Collapse of Her 20 Year Marriage & Her Bestselling Memoir · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And to really put things in place. And part of that actually was reconstructing our love story. Our life is a family. My own family of origin. And try to really look, since I wasn't getting any answers from him, look at myself and look at the decisions In a place of blame, but just like, okay, so I made these decisions about finances, I made these decisions about career, and here I am. And now what do I want it to look like going forward?”
2026-03-31 · The Oprah Podcast · Oprah with Belle Burden on the Collapse of Her 20 Year Marriage & Her Bestselling Memoir · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Became their thing, yeah. Yes, which May not be fair, but I just didn't want to be consumed with it. I didn't want to be consumed with what I got and didn't get, and I didn't want to be consumed with the betrayal. So I decided that when we signed our divorce agreement, that would be the marker, that I would not live in that place anymore. And in the book, I really tried to, and in modern love too, not speak from that kind of place to really speak factually about it.”
2026-03-31 · The Oprah Podcast · Oprah with Belle Burden on the Collapse of Her 20 Year Marriage & Her Bestselling Memoir · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, I hope so. Some people may not buy this because I wrote a book. But I had seen friends who had been through divorce and could not get themselves out of that place even long after the divorce was over. And it just infused their whole being. And I just did not want the rest of my life being the angry divorce.”
2026-03-31 · The Oprah Podcast · Oprah with Belle Burden on the Collapse of Her 20 Year Marriage & Her Bestselling Memoir · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because it harms your children by harming their father. And that is just not something we talk about. We keep private things private. And I, from the beginning, from the moment he asked me to say that it was amicable. I have always felt like being open and honest about this was my path forward. There was just going to be no other path than open honesty and doing it in a way that was not vindictive.”
2026-03-31 · The Oprah Podcast · Oprah with Belle Burden on the Collapse of Her 20 Year Marriage & Her Bestselling Memoir · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“By exposing the story about their father. They knew everything in the story. They had lived the story. But there was this idea that you should never, ever speak these stories out loud.”
2026-03-31 · The Oprah Podcast · Oprah with Belle Burden on the Collapse of Her 20 Year Marriage & Her Bestselling Memoir · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Which was really painful for me because I had put myself through that same question. Am I doing something harmful to my kids?”
2026-03-31 · The Oprah Podcast · Oprah with Belle Burden on the Collapse of Her 20 Year Marriage & Her Bestselling Memoir · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was on Martha's Vineyard. It came out on June 30th. 2023, and I was so excited because I had wanted to be a writer when I was a teenager and when I started trying to write down exactly what happened, I got very interested in the art of it again. And when it was picked, I just thought, oh my God, this is incredible. So I felt this pride and excitement. And it really, some people were incredibly congratulatory and supportive. And for other people, it made them very uncomfortable that I was speaking about this and writing about it. And for some, I think it made them, they were more critical of me writing about it than of him leaving.”
2026-03-31 · The Oprah Podcast · Oprah with Belle Burden on the Collapse of Her 20 Year Marriage & Her Bestselling Memoir · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Everybody is talking about it. And some people are uncomfortable with it. I had a couple of men that I knew well turn away from me and walk away from me without saying hello. And on the other hand, some people really move towards me. And it's taught me a lot about how to respond to someone who's going through anything, anything that's a sudden change or a difficult thing. I had people stop me on the street and say, I'm so sorry you're going through this or another woman who grabbed me by the shoulders and said, I'm going to take care of you. And it was such a beautiful thing. It really lifted me up. But there were harder reactions too. And I think for all those people bring their own family histories to these things And their reaction is definitely influenced by that.”
2026-03-31 · The Oprah Podcast · Oprah with Belle Burden on the Collapse of Her 20 Year Marriage & Her Bestselling Memoir · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I always love modern love column. Me too About a year after he left, when we were moving towards divorce, I felt like there were so many different narratives about what had happened, including from him.”
2026-03-31 · The Oprah Podcast · Oprah with Belle Burden on the Collapse of Her 20 Year Marriage & Her Bestselling Memoir · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, and that was only a weekend. And I just knew I couldn't do it, which is contrary to my personality. I'm shy, I'm very private. But I just knew I could not spin a false narrative about this. This was what was happening to me, what was happening to my kids”
2026-03-31 · The Oprah Podcast · Oprah with Belle Burden on the Collapse of Her 20 Year Marriage & Her Bestselling Memoir · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I would say my husband left me. I don't know why, and I am in agony. And the moment that he asked me for it to be to say it was amicable, he tried to tell me it would be better for me. I felt this full-bodied certainty that I could not do that, that I could not lie about it, that I would not survive this if I tried to lie about it. So when I ran into people, I just said it. And I never stopped saying it. And some people could handle it and some people could not.”
2026-03-31 · The Oprah Podcast · Oprah with Belle Burden on the Collapse of Her 20 Year Marriage & Her Bestselling Memoir · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes. And it was that was so deeply hard for me. And I happened to be in a community where Everyone was married. I felt like the only person who was not married. And so you kind of cross over from one day to the next, from being a part of something to being different to not being a part of that thing.”
2026-03-31 · The Oprah Podcast · Oprah with Belle Burden on the Collapse of Her 20 Year Marriage & Her Bestselling Memoir · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I felt it so intensely. I really felt so much shame as I re-entered the community that I'm a part of there. I felt like I had failed in keeping my husband interested in me, loving me. I had failed in keeping my family intact. I felt like I was less than all these other women who had stayed married. And I think for me, there are so many people who have been through this, but when you're going through it, you're not aware of that. You feel like you're the only person. This has happened to, and you feel so isolated in that page.”
2026-03-31 · The Oprah Podcast · Oprah with Belle Burden on the Collapse of Her 20 Year Marriage & Her Bestselling Memoir · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT