Belle Burden’s “Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage” is the runaway publishing phenomenon of the year. In January, it débuted at No. 1 on the Times hardcover nonfiction list. Four months after its publication, the book, in its ninth printing, still hovers near the top of the rankings. On NPR’s “All Things Considered,” the co-host Juana Summers summed up the popularity of “Strangers” by asking, “Have you ever had that experience, no matter who you talk to—your mom, your friend, your co-worker—they’re all telling you, ‘You’ve just got to read this book’?” Burden has sat for interviews on “Good Morning America,” and with Oprah Winfrey, Billy Bush, and Drew Barrymore. After a bidding war for the film rights, Gwyneth Paltrow is reportedly set to star in and executive-produce an adaptation for Netflix, with a screenplay by the acclaimed playwright Heidi Schreck.

The opening chapter of “Strangers,” which is expanded from a viral essay that Burden published in the Times’ “Modern Love” section, is fittingly cinematic. One evening early in the coronavirus pandemic, after Burden’s family left their Tribeca apartment to quarantine in their second home, on Martha’s Vineyard, Burden receives a phone call in which she discovers that her husband of twenty years is having an affair. By the next morning, he has left the island and is asking for a divorce. He rejects their life together; he doesn’t even want to share custody of their three children or any day-to-day parenting responsibilities. Burden had thought that she was happily married.

It’s easy to see why Burden’s story has resonated with so many readers. “Strangers” is a poignant account of how the end of a relationship can cast everything that came before it into shadow and uncertainty; it captures the panic and sorrow of suddenly not being able to recognize the person you are closest to. And, while some of the book’s emotional notes are near-universal, the author’s ancestry adds an irresistible sheen of money and glamour. Burden is a descendant, on her father’s side, of the railroad-and-shipping titan Cornelius Vanderbilt and, on her mother’s side, of Henry Morgan Tilford, one of the founders of Standard Oil; her maternal grandmother was the socialite Babe Paley.

In “Strangers,” Burden also weaves a gripping tale of financial imperilment—of a scion of a Gilded Age fortune brought low when she places too much faith in a secretive husband. The media response to Burden’s book has portrayed it as offering hard-won lessons in personal finance for all women in heterosexual partnerships. When Barrymore praised the book as “an incredible tutorial” on the hazards for women of ceding control over money to their husbands, leading to “scenarios where they are very financially hurt,” Burden replied, “Absolutely. And if I am a cautionary tale on this one subject, I am happy with that.”