No spoiler overview

There’s no denying that Belle Burden has gotten people thinking and talking with this one. Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage is an emotional deep-dive on how Burden’s marriage abruptly ended. She weaves together bits and pieces of her life to try answering what happened and how they got there.

Personally, I do not find this book worth the hype. I have heard a dozen versions of this story from women at all stages of life (certainly more interesting versions). It’s not a novel situation, but Burden treats it so. It seems to me the main reason this is such a “hit” is because Burden’s family are upper-class New Yorkers. Our society is always obsessed with what these people get up to behind closed doors. And I can only imagine that her connections helped make a splash when the book got published.

Full review

What didn’t work

Burden says she wants to tell her story for women, for her children, to be a cautionary tale. And yes, women should be able to have a voice and share their side of things… but you have to be honest when doing it.

After closing this book, I wanted to find the original article Burden wrote in The New York Times. Mainly because I was convinced that she didn’t need to expound this story any further than article-length. It was behind a paywall that I didn’t feel like coughing up for. But in my search, I found another article from The New Yorker covering the details left out of Burden’s story. A major theme of her story is around finances, particularly how much Burden stood to lose despite a prenup. But this article makes clear that Burden was never at huge risk, still holding several trusts at the time of the divorce which her husband would have no claim to.

If you ask me, it really seems like Burden met a man and turned her brain off. She was willing to do anything he wanted, just because he wanted it. They met while she was with someone else; Burden ended it for him. He didn’t like the prenup; she changed it despite lawyers urging her not to. He wanted to buy a place in Martha’s Vineyard; she used her trust to get it for them. On and on and on. The biggest offence to me was that she clearly knew the man had some weird ideas around money from his family. Even knowing that, she let him run the finances, fully handing over management to him. Brain: off.

I have to share a couple of quotes that made me absolutely stop in my tracks:

“He made me whiskey sours as the sun set (we believed reports that whiskey would kill the virus)…”

This was about COVID. Please say sike.

“When I found James searching the basement, I knew he wouldn’t find the prenup…. I didn’t find it. If I had, I would have burned it.”

I’m kind of shocked a lawyer allowed this to go out?? But I was slightly cheering for her in that moment.

“It also forced me to acknowledge how myopic, how grandiose, I’d been about my own story. It wasn’t just recognizing my comparative good fortune (which was enormous); it was seeing the scope of life, of challenge, of suffering, of what human beings endure; it was a zooming out.”

This was in reference to her pro bono work. I wish she had carried more of this sentiment throughout the rest of the book.

What did work

There was one part I found really interesting that I wish we got more of. Hearing the reactions of people to the divorce was so fascinating. Some people were horrible, and some just bizarre. I would’ve liked much more on that instead of reading about memoir writing classes (like ok we got it, you wrote a memoir).

I honestly am glad to hear about the growth she experienced after their divorce, and how she took back control of her life. If this is the story that gets people to stop giving up that control in the first place, then so be it.

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