In her new memoir The Next Day, Melinda French Gates shares numerous revelations about herself and her former marriage to Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates—including their difficult conversation to divorce after 27 years together.
In the book (and via People), Melinda wrote that she initially tried to push away her concerns about their relationship, but that didn’t work. She invited Bill on a trip to New Mexico in February 2020, where the couple tried to treat it “like any other vacation,” but on the last night of the trip, she told him she wanted to start living separately from him.
“It was one of the scariest conversations I’d have had,” Melinda wrote in the book, which came out April 15. Bill was “sad and upset” about the conversation, but also “understanding and respectful.”
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Once they returned home to Seattle, they worked together with the Gates Foundation while living separately, sometimes even making joint appearances, which Melinda wrote could be awkward. Though her divorce from Bill—which was finalized in 2021—is hard to write about (and subsequently talk about), Melinda told People that “It was important for me to be real” in sharing her story, and she hoped that her experience “might be helpful to someone else.”
The decision to separate five years ago came after Bill previously acknowledged that “he wasn’t always faithful to me,” Melinda wrote, and after their February decision to separate, in August Melinda told Bill she wanted a divorce in a long, occasionally “tender” conversation.
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“And then I got in the car to drive home,” she wrote. “On the way back, I pulled over into a parking lot and put on a Willie Nelson song we used to listen to together, ‘Always On My Mind.’ I bawled, sobbing over the steering wheel.”
“The day that followed was even weirder and more painful,” she wrote, as the two talked about how they were going to break the news of their divorce to their kids. After going to get burgers, “It was a scene that had played out hundreds of times between us,” Melinda continued. “But this time, we were talking about how we were going to separate our lives.”
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In a 2024 interview with TIME, Melinda spoke about life post-divorce, including that she was never a fan of the mansion she shared with Bill during their marriage. She prefers the simplicity of her post-divorce home to the opulence of their shared place, telling the outlet, “I live in a neighborhood. Now I can walk to little stores. I can walk to the drugstore, I can walk to a restaurant. I absolutely love it.”
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Melinda is also in a new relationship, she told People, telling the outlet earlier this month that she’s “very, very happy”—though she didn’t name her new partner.