Instead, she ended up sheltering in place with two of her three kids, alone: James left her for another woman. “I still have no understanding of why my husband left,” she wrote at the time. “His strangeness only increased, becoming an adversary in the divorce process.” But Burden does know what happened in her marriage. Amanda was formerly married to Burden’s father, Shirley Burden Jr., the onetime owner of the Village Voice and New York magazine. AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementStrangers recounts how James requested that Burden’s family’s generations-old prenup allow for separate finances that would remain yours in the case of a divorce.