Hit Memoir ‘Strangers’ Has Wealthy Women Checking Marital Mone

**SPEAKER_1** (0:02)
Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio, news.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:08)
You're listening to Bloomberg Businessweek with Carol Massar and Tim Stenovec on Bloomberg Radio.

**Carol Massar** (0:14)
This book has been everywhere, from news articles to podcasts, like even Oprah Winfrey, like celebrities have read it, and it's definitely a hit series. It's a memoir called Strangers. It's written by Bell Burden, and the TLDR, Too Long Didn't Read, the long story short is she's a Harvard-educated lawyer. She met her husband working in a law firm. They both have fancy jobs. They are both smart, educated, beautiful people. They get married.

**Isabelle Lee** (0:40)
Sounds like very New York story.

**Carol Massar** (0:42)
Yes. They get married, and then the guy continues to work, becomes a successful hedge fund manager, very New York, very Wall Street, and she stops working, and she said it was almost automatic. I stopped working, they had kids, they raised a family, and she said, I loved handing everything to him. I mean, don't yuck anyone's yum, as I say. If that's her preference, to let her husband handle everything, that's fine.

**Isabelle Lee** (1:05)
But I feel like the breakup was all squashed over a lot of New York newspapers.

**Carol Massar** (1:10)
They broke up, and I forgot to mention that she's obviously very privileged. She bought their homes, one in Martha's Vineyard, and a beautiful Tribeca flat. I don't even know if it's beautiful. I'm assuming it's beautiful. She's using her own trust fund money.

**Abha Bhattarai** (1:23)
Just sounds like it is.

**Carol Massar** (1:24)
So it's her own trust fund money, but when the man asked for a divorce, he wanted 50-50, and that's why in the book, she was like, oh, I was on the verge of losing both homes, and that's why a lot of the, I think, I don't want to say just women, but people who read this or maybe it's a husband who's dependent on the spouse financially. Where does that leave you? Again, it was a great read. It was an easy read. Lots to digest, lots to reflect upon, and we have the perfect guest for this, Abha Bhattarai. She's a Bloomberg News equality team leader. She wrote about this through the lens, of course, of Wall Street and business. I'm so excited to chat with you, Abha. Thank you so much for joining us.
What made you write about this?
Was it a discussion that you heard from your sources? The angle is so unique because again, it's about how women in financial circles suddenly had an awakening or maybe not an awakening. But again, it just made them realize that this is a huge risk that can happen to anyone.

**Abha Bhattarai** (2:29)
Yeah. It was just born out of conversations that I was having with my friends, that I was hearing people around me saying, I'm reading this book with my book club and oh my goodness, can you believe this happened? A lot of times women, wealthy or maybe not so wealthy, were saying, this really opened my eyes. Like I decided all of a sudden, I need to sit down, I need to know where all the money is, where it's invested, exactly what the terms are of our deed or our prenup. Sometimes it was as simple as just knowing where the usernames and passwords were, but it was a real wake up call for all of the women around me.
As I talked to more and more people, it seemed that this was really happening around the country as well.

**SPEAKER_1** (3:06)
Absolutely.

**Carol Massar** (3:07)
Because again, in the book, they were married for more than 20 years.
So you just really never know. In your story, you quoted a divorced lawyer in Manhattan, and she said she's had multiple women call about just reworking or creating financial agreements with their partners. Again, I was telling Carol earlier or in the intro, it could be the other way around. I know some folks in which the woman is the one working now, and the men are the dependent one financially. What did you learn from your reporting?

**Abha Bhattarai** (3:34)
Yeah, exactly. I think we have this notion that a prenuptial agreement is something that somebody with a ton of wealth makes somebody else sign, and then that's sort of it. But divorce attorneys really told me that's changing. It's becoming a much more fluid conversation, especially as people go in and out of the workplace to raise children, say, or just circumstances change. So today's agreements are much more fluid. They're being revised. People are even getting post-nuptial agreements to catch up to these new realities and they're saying, hey, wait a minute, what if I step out of the workforce? Then can I get a cut of your retirement money? Can I get a cut of the investments that I'm missing out on?