This year's viral memoir will make your blood boil

Strangers, by Belle Burden

I initially decided to swerve Strangers. I felt like I’d supped a little too fulsomely from the trough of break-up books last year - Splinters, All Fours, Liars. And then I read the interviews and an extract that left my friend Sirin and I reeling, and so with my blood beginning to boil, I acquired a copy, and read it in one night in the bath. (I spend 50% of my waking hours in the bath. Ish.)

For those who have missed the hype, Strangers is a memoir from first time author, Belle Burden, who wrote an essay for The New York Times’s cult Modern Love column, in 2023, from which this book was then commissioned. For many years, Burden was married to a wealthy financier, with whom she shared three children and a life of 0.01% WASPy luxury. Until, after 20 years, during the first lockdown, Burden receives a message from a man who says that his wife has been having an affair with her husband. She calls the man, who picks up and - I find this extraordinary, why not text her back later? - confirms that yes, they were having an affair, but he cannot talk, for his wife has tried to kill herself.

Wide-eyed and white-faced she turns around only to find her husband, equally wide-eyed and white-faced. It meant nothing, she is very young, he pleads, cajoles, apologises. Burden retreats to her bedroom, him to the guest room, and she tosses and turns all night, while deciding what to do. The next morning, at 6am, he marches in mutinously: he is dressed, he has a bag, he is leaving her, and he wants nothing. She can keep the house on Martha’s Vineyard, the Manhattan apartment, and sole custody of the children. He wants nothing.

This isn’t a spoiler, incidentally, it’s on the back of the book and it’s the opening salvo, an aggressive beginning to an unexpected new life. What is so shocking is not that he left - “He thinks he’s original, but he’s not” - but that he never gave her an explanation. Still to this day, he has never given her one. She had no idea he was unhappy. And in refusing to claim his stake, he leaves Burden with the agonising impression that everything they had built together, was disposable. Including - and most painfully - their children.

Clearly, this makes for riveting reading, but there are further layers. She bought their Martha’s Vineyard house, not him. Despite her not earning - she works sometimes as a pro-bono lawyer - she matches his contribution into their monthly pot, from her trust fund, and her family pay for the children’s private school fees. And so when he says he wants nothing, he is a) lying and b) has already taken a huge amount of her money. It takes Burden a long time to realise this, because they had a traditional marriage, where the division of labour is such that he took care of their finances and she kept home. Their outmoded ‘arrangement’ - where labour outside of the home is valued more highly than labour inside of it - reads like something out of the 1950s, although I still know of several husbands who behave like this, which, naturally, makes me want to claw my eyes out. (Of course, he still has time for expensive hobbies.)

“He didn’t like the mundane tasks of taking care of kids and often said, with some humour, “I don’t do bath, bed or homework.” And he didn’t…. We had made an unspoken bargain: he would work all the time and I would take care of the kids all the time. I resented this sometimes, usually when I was stressed, when one of the kids was sick, or when they were melting down over something. But most of the time, I liked his fervent commitment to his work. It was impressive, and it seemed honourable to me, to put so much time in, to be such a dutiful employee, to be working so hard for our family’s long-term financial security. It felt like he was taking care of us, each time he put on his suit, each time he laboured at his desk on a Saturday.”

A passage drenched in portent.

And the other layer to this, is that Burden is the granddaughter of the magazine editor and socialite, Babe Paley (one of Truman Capote’s swans) and founder of CBS, Bill Paley, and her family lineage is one of moneyed, photographed, high society. Burden’s mother can’t remember her own mother ever touching her, she lived in a separate house from her children, and for Burden, “[Paley’s] neglect, the coldness, is difficult to explain, difficult to excuse.” And so she sought something different for her own life, less high society, more domestic security, a husband who was not ‘public’. “He said that we were so different from other couples because we were so compatible, so similar - quiet, cerebral, happiest at home” (that old red flag, we’re not like everyone else.)

When her ex-husband leaves, Burden examines her privilege from a new angle (she is rigorous, in this). He has minimised her, yes, by making her feel like she would not understand their finances, but she had also “settled into the vagueness, the luxury and privilege of not knowing.” How often do we hear this, from wives of terrible men? The ‘not knowing’ is a symptom is a tactic, an armour. What you don’t know, can’t hurt you.

Until, of course, she knows everything horribly and all at once. Her ex-husband leaves, but it is she who carries the shame. I remember, with force, the part in Meena Kandasamy’s When I Hit You when the heroine runs home with bleeding feet to her parents and they tell her she has brought shame on them, for leaving her marriage. This is not India and this is not Burden’s fate - her mother sends her an ecstatic, loving message after her essay is published - but her extended social group is as private as it is patriarchal. One ‘friend’ tells Burden that everyone thinks she did it for revenge. Not because she had always wanted to be a writer. Not because through art, she might find the agency her ex-husband denied her. Another ‘friend’ tells her that someone they know is calling her a ‘bad mother’. Because a good mother would never tell her story.

And it is then that a new Burden emerges, one who refuses to play nicely and quietly and accept the shame of abandonment. The situations are not remotely comparable, but I am reminded, here, of Gisèle Pelicot’s rallying cry: that shame must change sides. The women of Burden’s family have always absorbed the worst behaviours of their husbands (Babe Paley famously fell out with Truman Capote in 1975, after he wrote a thinly veiled story about her husband’s alleged affair), but she refuses to do that, she will not teach her children that men can get away with anything. (This book is her ultimate defiance.)

“Without being conscious of it, as a child and a young adult, I absorbed this legacy of infidelity. I heard my grandfather described as “naughty”, my mother’s boyfriend as a “flirt”, the betrayals chalked up to unavoidable temptation, a natural accessory to success. I saw that my grandmother and others had forgiven these men, that they’d quietly cleaned up the mess, never saying a word about it. I felt, in my bones, an acceptance of men behaving badly, a value in not calling them out, in protecting a man’s belief in his own importance, and a premium placed on keeping such things private.

I thought I had ended this legacy by marrying someone so steady, so unassuming, someone who didn’t have a public presence, someone who didn’t flirt with older women, at least not in front of me. But I had repeated it in spectacular fashion. Unlike my grandfather and my mother’s boyfriend, James seemed to have no regret, and he didn’t want me back. The similarity was that he felt entitled to do it, and he expected me to stay quiet about it.”

These are the best paragraphs in the book.

It goes without saying, that Burden’s side of the story is exactly that: a side. Her ex-husband has denied much of the book and has said he has a wonderful relationship with his children, though I can’t imagine Burden is lying when she says in 5 years he’s never had them for over-night stays, despite living in the same city, and that he refuses to keep a bedroom for any of his 3 children, one of whom was 12 when he left. He deemed them ‘grown’, which is the kind of bizarre defence that someone who does not care to raise their own children might say, because 12 is a child.

“For almost a year, I tried to engage James in parenting… I still wanted a partner in all of it… But more often, for everyday issues, he responded with irritation. Or he seemed mystified, like he had no idea what to do, like the kids were people he’d only recently met. Eventually, I stopped asking for help. It was too painful to be turned down, to encounter someone who felt like a distant relative when I expected to find my children’s father.”

The book is at times blood boiling and engrossing and at other times mundane and repetitive: there is much description of what they bought, or cooked, or the design of the houses, although I imagine the intention of this is to build up a seductive picture of incredible comfort and ease, in order for the narrative to plummet from the greatest height. It is boggling to read about the fight over who will have membership to the country club, and uncomfortable to read how they flexed Covid rules - her ex-husband flying in and out of Martha’s Vineyard whenever he felt like it - but again, reflective of the lives they lived and its social dynamics.

It is not a poetic book, but it is clear, candid and thoughtful, and I think the reason it has hit a nerve is because it speaks to a collective primal fear: that you can never really know another person.