Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage

What do you do if, in the early morning hours, your husband informs you that he wants a divorce, packs a bag, and then walks out the door?

It would take some time, but eventually, author Belle Burden pulled herself and her children together. Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage is the result of that regrouping. In 241 pages, Burden recalls not only her bewilderment at his leaving but her hurt when she realized that she had not protected herself financially, nor was her soon-to-be ex-husband sympathetic to her plight. 

In some ways, ‘Marriage’ is a warning to all women who depend on their good marriages to working and/or wealthy husbands to relieve them of financial concerns. According to Burden, she put her money from two trusts into buying their two properties, a house on Martha’s Vineyard and a New York apartment. Except for pro bono work, the once practicing lawyer mostly gave up her career to raise children. 

After the shock of her husband’s walkout (which happens in the first chapter), Burden takes the reader along in exploring her financial and emotional situation after she “trusted” her husband with her own money and her future. She would find out that she’d signed a prenup that did not allow her claim to any money or property that was in her husband’s name. His earnings were also his. She had put his name on the houses she bought with her trust fund money. 

Although she had practiced law, she was also an heir to old money through her parents and grandparents. Her grandmother was New York socialite Babe Paley (wife of the former owner of CBS, William Paley) (also that Babe Paley of writer Truman Capote’s illustrious “swans"). Her father, Carter Burden, was a New York politician, a co-owner of the Village Voice, and, through his grandfather, an heir to the Vanderbilt fortune. Her mother was a daughter of Paley’s first husband, Stanley J. Mortimer, himself the scion of 19th-century wealth and high-society clout, including a grandparent who was one of the founders of Standard Oil. 

Still following? Burden had grown up summering with her grandmother, Bebe, on Long Island, and although the book isn’t really a memoir of her privileged earlier life, writers and journalists have argued that she was and still is wealthy enough and most likely had or will have other resources (current and future inheritances) regardless of her divorce.

The book’s main focus is on Burden’s awakening from the realization that she willingly gave up her agency as a partner in the marriage. It covers the unraveling of financials, why the prenup was so iron-clad, and what she did to fight it. The book also covers her journey from shock and dismay that her marriage is over to anger, to rediscovering her identity through singleness, and, eventually, to finding some sympathy and understanding for her ex-husband. 

‘Strangers’ is a book about Burden’s experience of the breakup, so in many ways, her husband’s POV remains unknown. Naturally, in Burden’s view, in the beginning, he is despicable, a cheater. By the middle, he is someone she remembers who carries financial insecurity stemming from his childhood. Eventually, he fades into the stranger of the title. 

Although slender in pages, the book is fat in details of how things eventually work out. For a writer who only recently began writing, Burden has a style; words often read like prose, guiding the reader a little further into the once-couple’s story. 

The book does touch on the immediate effect her husband’s departure had on their two girls (preteens at the time of the split) and son, who question their father’s reasoning and stay close emotionally and physically to their mother during an unstable time. Yet the book makes clear that their understanding of what happened will continue to be a work in progress. 

Is it worth reading? Yes, as birth, death, and even divorce are a part of life. Is everyone this rich, this privileged? No, but that may not be the main point.