Review of Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage by Belle Burden

I was surprised by how interested I was in the implosion of Burden's privileged life. She captures the universality of heartbreak; the chilling notion that a partner in a decades-long marriage could wake up and leave without warning or remorse; and her emergence from the trauma as a stronger version of herself.

It was a great love story, one for the ages. The speed of our beginning and the speed of our ending felt like matching bookends. They both came out of nowhere. He wanted it, he wanted me. And then he didn’t. 

Belle Burden, whose parents and grandparents were moneyed and well known in high society, grew up in a golden life of wealth and privilege.

Burden was more than twenty years into her marriage, living between posh homes in Tribeca and Martha's Vineyard, raising three children (with her own Harvard law degree largely languishing unused), when her hedge-fund-manager husband abruptly disclosed a recent affair and, seemingly without remorse or struggle, left Belle, the children, the dog, the houses--their whole life. He offered no explanation and no apology, then he set about threatening to take everything from her and the kids.

In Strangers, Burden recounts her shock, shame, and her reckoning; she had let her husband make too many of their decisions, handle all of their finances, shape the rhythms of the house, and force Belle to be quiet and small. As their lives crept along, she facilitated their uneven power structure by running their home lives and trusting him to look out for her and the kids through his side of the partnership--the salary-earning, financial planning, and, in what is eventually a pivotal point, legal ownership of essential assets she believed to be shared between them in a good-faith, love- and trust-based marriage.

Her husband abruptly decides not to be emotionally (or financially) invested in his wife, children, or family life any longer, saying, "I feel like a switch has flipped. I'm done." He said, "You can have the house and the apartment. You can have custody of the kids. I don't want it. I don't want any of it."

The family's extreme privilege could have felt offputting or could have made Burden's story feel unrelatable and remote, but I found the "lifestyles of the rich and famous" aspect of their situation fascinating. I was particularly struck by the universal heartbreak: their overflowing coffers and Burden's generational wealth surely cushioned their falls (while the fight for and splitting of significant assets added to their personal concerns during the split). Yet a forsaken marriage, an affair, and emotional abandonment like those Burden recounts causes turmoil and a broken heart regardless of other circumstances.

A friend and I were talking recently about our younger days and our early perceptions of marriage, and we agreed that having heard nebulous "we just grew apart" divorce accounts had always been the most chilling, the most frightening, the most alarming. How did two people living in a home, sharing a life, and building a future grow apart? Could one person simply decide it was over, without the other person realizing they had been on shaky ground? Would it take one partner by surprise? Did it happen suddenly? Could it happen to us?

As she sets up her part of the story, Burden delves into the backgrounds of her notable, famous, wealthy family members, their personalities, quirks, shortcomings, key histories, and often challenging family dynamics. At times their larger-than-life presences greatly overshadow Belle's own relatively small, quiet existence. But as she works through her personal trauma, she moves past others' legacies to retrace the stages of her own relationship; she begins to piece together how she and her husband got to where they are.

As she sorts through the past and works to find support and to function more fully in the present, she decides to refuse to be shamed as the woman who was left, who is perceived as not enough to have kept her husband. She grows more bold, finds healing in speaking her mind, and becomes determined to write her story and share her perspective. Strangers grew out of a "Modern Love" essay and is her account of her pain, confusion, and reemergence as a truer version of herself.

I could see that some people...were uncomfortable with me coming out of my lane, a place where women stayed quiet, where men are allowed to do what serves them, no matter what the wreckage.... To them, a woman writing about a man leaving is, somehow, worse than the man leaving.

I was intrigued by this fast read; I finished it in a day and a half. I received a prepublication electronic version of Strangers, scheduled for publication today, courtesy of NetGalley and Random House.

More More More Memoirs

You can find other memoirs I've read and reviewed, including multiple lists of my favorites, here.