Belle Burden

There was just gonna be no other path than open honesty and doing it in a way that was not vindictive.

Yes, I hope so.

Some people may not buy this because I wrote a book, but I had seen friends who'd 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.

Yeah.

And I just did not want the rest of my life to be that.

Yes, which...

It 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.

Yes.

Like all writers, I think I was writing to figure it out.

And to really put things in place.

And part of that actually was reconstructing our love story, our life as 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 I made over 20 years that kind of put me in the place that I was.

Not...

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.