Belle Burden

I have a lot more to say.

And so I got an agent and then we did a proposal and went out to editors and my book was sold a few months later.

Actually, when I first met with the woman who became my editor, she envisioned the structure and it clicked for me too, which was to start in the present and then go backwards to explore both my family of origin and meeting and falling in love with my husband and then to return to the present again.

and go from there.

It felt really critical to me for two reasons to go backwards into my own history and into my relationship.

When marriages end like this,

Everything that came before gets erased, including all the good things.

And I did not want that for myself or for my kids.

So I really reconstructed our love story.

I reconstructed our life as a family, which was very happy for a long time.

So I wanted to do that.

And then the other thing that I really wrestled with in this book is the fact that both my mother and my grandmother were

were with men who were unfaithful.

And I thought I had reversed that legacy by marrying someone who was very stable, not a public presence, never yelled, but I repeated it in a spectacular fashion.

So I thought, what is it about the women in my family where this

this is a pattern and how do I stop that pattern?

So that required going back and talking about my childhood, my mother, my grandmother.

What it means to me is actually talking about it.

So talking about it with friends, talking about it with my children, talking about it publicly.

And that does not mean bad mouthing my ex.