Margaret Ryznar, a visiting professor at Brooklyn Law School who specializes in trusts and estates, had a somewhat different view on the prenup. “Our modern idea of marriage is that it’s a partnership, and that would be reflected by dividing his earnings in the divorce,” Ryznar told me. “Presumably she enabled him to make those earnings by taking care of the home, taking care of the children, putting his career first,” whereas Davis had no role in generating Burden’s inheritance.

On the podcast “Lipstick on the Rim,” Burden remarked that she had “inherited wealth, shall we say, on both sides—it wasn’t a ton of money.” Her “primary assets,” she explains in “Strangers,” “were held in two trusts.” Burden used the funds in one of these trusts, “in their entirety,” she writes, to purchase the apartment in Tribeca. According to publicly available records, Burden bought the apartment for just under four million dollars, with a million-dollar mortgage, in 2002. “My last trust,” she writes, was put toward the Martha’s Vineyard house. The assets in this trust, she explains, “matched the purchase price exactly, minus a small mortgage.” She paid $5.4 million for the house; the “small mortgage” was, in fact, for three million dollars, according to publicly available records.

Burden returns to the matter of the two trusts often in interviews, usually stressing that they had held most of her assets and that she had drained them to buy the two properties. “I had emptied my trusts to purchase our homes,” she writes in the book. Despite the terms of the prenup, Burden decided to place Davis’s name alongside hers on both deeds. (“I thought that was what you did when you were married—share everything,” she writes.) As a result, when Burden and Davis split up, Davis had a fifty-per-cent stake in both homes, and, for a time in their divorce proceedings, he appeared ready to lay claim to his half of each.

The prospect of losing these homes is an integral plot point in “Strangers.” “I could not afford to buy James out of either home. I would have to sell both,” Burden writes. “My children were going to lose the house they loved, the center of our life as a family, and the apartment where they lived, in addition to managing the emotional toll of their father leaving. I was going to lose what my grandparents and my father had given me, betraying them too. I was going to lose my financial security.” This period—the weeks after the judge dismissed Burden’s counterclaim, when she felt herself slipping into financial quicksand—is the emotional nadir of “Strangers.” “I fell into a deep well of despair and shame,” she writes, adding, “It was the same paralysis I’d felt in the first weeks after James left, but it felt much darker.”

Burden’s interviewers have lingered over this episode as well. “You had to worry about your finances, about losing your home,” Summers said to Burden. “Walk me through how you found yourself in such a precarious financial position.” The podcaster Haley Sacks, of “Financial Tea with Mrs. Dow Jones,” told her audience that “Belle was forced to confront the most terrifying financial reality. . . . She was standing on a trap door with basically no cord to pull.”

During Burden’s “Lipstick on the Rim” appearance, one of the hosts, Molly Sims, explained that, at the time of the divorce, Burden had “no income coming in for her family, and she has to give up half of both homes, and if you don’t pay off the other, they’re gonna make you sell.”

“Yes, exactly,” Burden replied. “And then he had amassed a fortune but it was in his name alone.”

“And he gave you none of that,” Sims said.

“I—no, he gave me none of that. He gives me child support, but I have nothing from that.”

“After twenty years,” Sims said, “he gave you nothing.”

It’s evident from the book, however, that Burden did have her own income, because she affirms that she and Davis shared expenses, as agreed to in their prenup. She also maintained a separate American Express account for purchases that she did not want Davis—whom she portrays as controlling and selectively thrifty—to see. Documents filed in the divorce show that, in 2019, Burden reported an income of a little over eight hundred thousand dollars, including a hundred and ninety thousand dollars from the sale of her mother’s house in the Catskills. (A spokesperson for Burden said that her income that year was atypically high. Davis made well into the seven figures in 2019.)

Watching Jeff Kinney sign books is akin to watching an elaborate piece of performance art. Backstage at a theatre in Chester, where the author is continuing his UK tour, three folding tables heave under the weight of thousands of copies. Kinney wheels round the table on a swivel chair, signing as he goes. He is a picture of total focus.

Today Kinney is signing copies of Partypooper, the 20th book in his blockbuster Diary of a Wimpy Kid series. Every copy bears the phrase “Over 300 million books sold”. To put that into perspective, Kinney has sold more books than Led Zeppelin have sold albums. If you’ve had – or been – a child of reading age at any point over the last couple of decades, Kinney is a rock star. And nowhere is that clearer than at his sold-out event later that evening, as he is custard-pied while a crowd of 800 children and parents scream with excitement.

Kinney shows are a world away from the usual sedate author signings. This is a performance, with walk-on characters and audience participation so enthusiastic that one poor mum almost tore herself in half trying to do the splits. It’s impressive stuff, especially since Kinney claims not to be a natural. “I’m not the type of person who needs to stand in the spotlight,” he insists backstage. “I’m a writer. I chose that profession because I’m an introvert. So it’s a weird thing to be on stage, but these days, if you’re a children’s writer, you also need to learn to be an entertainer.”

Formerly a software engineer, Kinney first created Wimpy Kid – about the various misadventures of titular middle school student Greg Heffley – for the browser game site Funbrain. Three years later, the first book was released and immediately became a sensation, thrilling children with its relatable characters and the sheer density of jokes. The Wimpy Kid books read like exceptionally well-crafted observational comedy routines, something that lures in children reluctant to delve into, say, bricklike, lore-heavy fantasy series.

Now 54 years old, and greying at the temples, Kinney is both very tall and extremely polite. And, for someone who has to be richer than God, unflappably normal. He could quite easily pass as a friendly teacher, or someone who runs a small pottery business.

Yet, at this point in his career, Kinney feels untouchable. Every new Wimpy Kid book is an event and while the pressure of maintaining such a beloved series for so long might get to some authors, Kinney wears it lightly. “I’ve got a whole world that I feel responsible for, and employees that I have. People have careers that come out of this engine, so I definitely need to keep the motor running. I’m aware of that, but I wouldn’t call it pressure. It’s a nice place to be.”

Although the series has existed since 2007, Partypooper is just as funny and kinetic as any of his previous books, with a gleeful darkness that lingers around the edges. Greg Heffley remains possibly the most lovable psychopath in all of children’s literature; one scene in the new book sees him blow out a funeral candle in a crazed bid to have a wish granted.

“Every year I ask the big questions,” he says. “What am I doing? Why am I doing this? Three days ago I was trying to state my goals. Consistency and longevity at a high level in comedy is my current goal. I think a lot about Bob Dylan. I’m certainly not trying to compare myself to Bob Dylan, but he just moves forward. And I think that’s a nice model.”

Kinney has become the custodian of an entire franchise. As well as the books and the riotous shows he takes around the world (as soon as the Chester show finishes, he flies out for a leg in Germany), he also writes the screenplays for all of Disney’s Wimpy Kid movies (the latest, The Last Straw, came out in early December). He credits working across so many mediums for his ability to keep the books fresh.

“My first few books are just like a collection of jokes,” he smiles. “I didn’t care that much about telling a good story. But when those books were adapted for the screen, I started learning about structure. It wasn’t until book nine that I even tried to tell a good story. And it wasn’t until book 12 that I started to get the hang of it. The first book that I’m proud of as a narrative is my 19th book, which only came out last year.”

If that wasn’t enough to juggle, Kinney also has a sideline as a town planner. When his books started to take off, he used some of the funds to open a bookshop – An Unlikely Story – in his hometown of Plainville, Massachusetts. And when the store became a success he decided to branch out and apply the same formula to the entire region.

“The downtown is very depressed,” he says. “The industry is gone, and now you’re left with this town where everybody lives, but they don’t have anything to do. So what we’re doing is we’re building. We just finished a beer garden, and now we’re gonna put in a pizza restaurant, and then we’re going to create a town green and some other things too.”

When a series has enjoyed a run as long as Wimpy Kid’s, some authors can begin to feel restless. Kinney has toyed with the margins of his universe in recent years, with a spin-off series about Heffley’s best friend, and a collection of short stories. I ask him if he has an end goal, a number of books he’d like to hit before he moves on.

“Right at this moment, I really am looking out over the horizon,” he replies, slowly at first. “There were two goals I wanted to reach. One was book 20, and the other was 300 million books in print. I didn’t ever think beyond that. And now I’ve gotta say, what’s next?”

For a moment, I worry that he’s about to give me an unhappy exclusive and announce his retirement. But no. “When you look at what I’ve created here, it’s not so much a literary character as a cartoon character,” he goes on. “Cartoon characters tend to go on for a long time. I’m not embarrassed by it. You know, Charles Schulz did Peanuts for 50 years.”

A quietly logical man, he writes his books with an elaborate process that involves obsessively journalling and then using a practice derived from engineering called Systematic Inventive Thinking to mine the journals for jokes. And this formula should allow Wimpy Kid to run and run.

“It’s just such a privilege to have a long-running series because, you know, it’s hard to break in as a writer,” he says. “I’m very aware of how lucky I am to not have to introduce myself to the public when I have a new book. I’m more like a legacy person now, and I like that better. You know when you see photos of Schulz or Dr Seuss and they’re old? They’re looking a little bent over with their glasses on. I’m headed for that. I’m headed to my final form.”

Now, Mother, What’s the Matter?

Only the monsters do not have troubled hearts.
Life is for troubled hearts. Art is for troubled
hearts. For my whole life, Hamlet has been
a bridge between. Hamlet’s ‘Now, mother,
what’s the matter?’ is life on earth. Something
is always the matter, and not just for mothers.
(As I write this, the Angelus rings.) Every
character in Hamlet is troubled, there are
no monsters in it. I render unto Caesar
the things that are Caesar’s — everything is
troubled there and, if I am lucky, Caesar
is troubled. I render unto God the things
that are God’s and feel — want to feel? Do feel —
that God is troubled. I also render unto art.
But I have no idea what art is. What
Edward Thomas’s ‘Adlestrop’ is. What
the luminous chaos of The Portrait of
a Lady is. What The Pilgrim’s Progress is.
My feet knew the way before I opened
the book: that just before the gate to heaven
is yet another hole to hell.

Richard W Halperin was born in Chicago to an Irish mother, and an American father with Russian ancestry. Early in his childhood the family moved to New York. He taught for a short period at Hunter College, and subsequently made a career in education administration, latterly with Unesco in Paris, where he currently lives.

Now, Mother, What’s the Matter? is from the New Poems section of All the Tattered Stars: Selected and New Poems published by Salmon Poetry in 2023 to celebrate Halperin’s 80th birthday.

The New York School’s influence is audible in his work’s refreshing lightness of texture. Halperin is deeply serious, though, about the function and power of art, cinema and the literary arts in particular. Considering the impact of a poem sequence by an unnamed writer, he says of their portrayal of daughterhood, “None of this is my experience, / All of it is my experience. / Don’t tell me I cannot be daughter.”

Hamlet’s address to his mother, Gertrude, which forms the current poem’s title, is freighted with his still-to-be-spoken accusation – of lechery and adultery with his uncle, Claudius, if not direct connivance in the murder of his father, King Hamlet. Halperin, abandoning quote marks or footnotes, cleverly escapes Shakespeare at the same time, and allows himself a little dry fun with the ideal of universality. The unanchored question inevitably sheds some of its specific complexity, and starts to look like a sentence a contemporary son or daughter might utter to a mother who is entirely innocent of the dangerous “matter” associated with Gertrude. Perhaps, as the child’s emphatic “Now” might suggest, this mother is overdoing some small complaint, and the words are uttered with mockery or exasperation rather than complete earnestness (though the latter isn’t impossible). Halperin’s artfully expanded context demonstrates the subjectivity of artistic interpretation.

His speaker goes on to renew, lightly, the seriousness associated with the original context. The near-euphemism “troubled hearts” suggests a complex perspective from which to read Hamlet’s mother and the play’s other characters – in fact, mothers and “others” in general. Hamlet, the play, has always been the speaker’s bridge between “life” and “art”, he says, since both are “for troubled hearts”. “Hamlet’s ‘Now, mother, / what’s the matter?’ is life on earth. Something / is always the matter, and not just for mothers.” Art permits self-recognition: it brings “troubled hearts” into an encounter with themselves.

This “matter” is gracefully expressed, with the interrupting comment from the Angelus bell pertinently timed. The Angelus marks the incarnation of Christ announced when the Angel Gabriel visits the Virgin Mary. It’s now that Halperin’s denial of there being any “monsters” in Hamlet makes a sharpened point. Art offers a route out of the judgmental “monsters v angels” binaries of religion, though not, of course, a route out of the problems of morality.

In the agreed obligation to Caesar, referencing Christ’s words from Matthew 22:21, Halperin projects himself into that imperial political scene and updates it: “I render unto Caesar / the things that are Caesar’s — everything is / troubled there and, if I am lucky, Caesar / is troubled. I render unto God the things / that are God’s and feel — want to feel? — do feel / that God is troubled. I also render unto art.”

Being “troubled” might be less of a guarantee of compassion than hoped. But the cleverly nervous enjambment that sustains a biblical and colloquial mix of register encourages tentative optimism.

As the speaker disarmingly confesses, he has “no idea what art is”. Art seems more demanding than any Caesar. The intransitive form of “render” in “I also render unto art” suggests more than self-giving service – the possibility of psychic “rending”, for example.

The three literary texts the speaker cites later seem random, but may have a common theme of pilgrimage, one that might stretch to include both the heroine of The Portrait of a Lady, Isabel Archer, and the poet Edward Thomas. The concept admits Halperin’s persona, too: “My feet knew the way before I opened / the book”. The mind is pre-patterned with the traditional techniques of storytelling. What the speaker unquestioningly knows is “that just before the gate to heaven / is yet another hole to hell.” That conclusion is surprising and suggests the unilluminable: then we remember the poet Dante, who illuminated the hell holes, too. Without irony, Halperin reveals the magnitude of the literary pilgrimage.

Drama and fiction, poetry and allegory, are consolidated by the last three lines; “troubled hearts” and “holes to hell” are always integral. To travel these worlds, without rejecting the human-ness of the misnamed demons and monsters, may be another foundational characteristic of literary art.

A US publishing house has decided to publish official reports into sensitive matters in US politics and history against the backdrop of a new Donald Trump administration committed to a radical rightwing agenda of reshaping American government and fiercely aggressive against its opponents, especially in the media.

The publisher, Melville House, will on Tuesday release The Jack Smith Report, a print and ebook edition of the special counsel’s summation of his investigation of Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election.

Later in February, the company will then publish another report the Department of Justice issued shortly before Trump returned to power, concerning the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921.

Dennis Johnson, co-founder of Melville House with his wife, Valerie Merians, said The Jack Smith Report would be published with no frills: “It is just a report, and we’re just reprinting it. We’re not doing anything to it. We’re not adding anything in the front or back. We’re not getting star introductions or anything. We just wanted it to speak for itself.”

But he also described an urgent need to put out physical copies, in light of Trump’s push to revenge himself on prosecutors who worked for Smith and FBI agents who investigated the January 6 attack on Congress.

Johnson said the same for the Tulsa report, amid a drive to stamp out diversity, equity and inclusion policies which has resulted in the disappearances of official online resources related to the history of racism and civil rights.

Johnson has published federal reports before, achieving notable sales for the CIA Torture Report (2014) and the Mueller Report (2019), the latter concerning Russian election interference and links between Trump and Moscow.

Melville House has always been “mission-driven”, Johnson said, describing a company “founded as a minor but sincere attempt to stand up to the [election] of George Bush”.

Nonetheless, after Trump’s victory over Kamala Harris in November, Johnson and his staff found themselves “just stumped. We had no ideas … we just felt totally defeated … and then there was this murmuring about the Jack Smith report coming. And when we heard that, after two or three months of being in a bunk and a daze, we just immediately thought we should do that.”

Smith was appointed in November 2022, under the Biden administration. He investigated “whether any person or entity violated the law in connection with efforts to interfere with the lawful transfer of power following the 2020 presidential election”, as well as Trump’s retention of classified documents after leaving power.

Ultimately, Smith filed four criminal charges relating to election subversion and 40 concerning retention of classified records. Trump pleaded not guilty but his lawyers and a compliant Florida judge secured delays, meaning neither case reached trial before November.

After Trump’s election win, Smith closed his cases. Before Trump returned to power, the Department of Justice released part one of Smith’s report, covering his work on Trump’s election subversion. Part two, on Trump’s retention of classified information, remains under wraps.

Melville House has moved fast. Johnson said such “crash publishing” required hard work and help from printers, retailers and more. But the Jack Smith Report, he said, would “launch into a very different book culture than the last time we were in this predicament, in 2016. People are very afraid.

“We did the Mueller Report and there were two other significant publications. There was Simon and Schuster, they’re one of the biggest publishers in the world, and there was Skyhorse, which is independent but much bigger than us … and yet we got our book on the bestseller list.

“We knew that wasn’t going to happen this time, because the big houses, we’re guessing, are intimidated – don’t want any hard feelings with the White House. Trump has already informed Penguin he’s going to sue them about a critical biography they published last year [Lucky Loser, by Susanne Craig and Russ Buettner.] And the publisher with Skyhorse [Tony Lyons] actually worked on the presidential campaign of Robert F Kennedy Jr [now Trump’s nominee for health secretary] so we knew he wasn’t going to put [the Smith report] out. So we’d have the field to ourselves, which is good.”

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“I think there’s a world of independent booksellers who are eager to be supporting something that speaks to the moment, that somehow stands up for what’s right.”

It took the Department of Justice more than 100 years to stand up a proper investigation of the Tulsa Race Massacre – one of the most unjustly obscure episodes in US history, in which hundreds were killed when Greenwood, Oklahoma, a prosperous Black neighborhood, was destroyed by a white mob.

No charges were brought. Under Joe Biden, a new investigation was carried out by a cold case unit of the justice department civil rights division named for Emmett Till, a Black teen murdered by white men in Mississippi in 1955. The Tulsa report was released on 10 January. Ten days later, Trump returned to power – and announced sweeping changes at the civil rights division.

Calling the new Tulsa report “nauseating and gripping”, Johnson said: “We went to the Library of Congress and found a lot of the photos which might have been part of the initial report when the massacre happened, that the predecessor of the FBI did, the investigation this report criticizes. They supplement the information but it only takes a few pictures to make the point. They’re just aerial shots of devastation. It’s like Munich in world war two. Hiroshima. Total devastation.”

Johnson hopes his editions of the Jack Smith and Tulsa reports will find places in “libraries and classrooms” as well as homes. When he was a boy, he said, adults he knew “had the Pentagon Papers paperback in their home, they might have had the Warren Commission and later the Starr Report. I want people to feel these reports are part of the American historic record.”