When reading Belle Burden’s compelling Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage published earlier this year, the remarkable, timeless nature of Jane Austen’s insight into relationships came to mind. Specifically her statement in Pride and Prejudice that “true love is much more cherishing than money and social position.” At the start of her memoir, Belle Burden, an American attorney specialising in juvenile immigration cases, certainly has money and social position and believes, with good reason, that she has true love too.
Online, Burden is often referred to as ‘an heiress’, her parents and grandparents as ‘socialites’. She belongs to a New York social and financial elite. However, despite her wealth and the love that is evident between her and many of her immediate family, including her stepmother, growing up she was exposed to those same people’s multiple infidelities, divorces and pain. She lacked any family role models who had made marriage work
Burden anonymises most of the people described in the book, and whilst many of the minor characters will be protected, a moment’s googling has the key family members before us, glamorous photos and all. All the same, she calls her husband ‘James’ throughout.
Burden meets James at work. He too is a lawyer. She’s not sure about him at first but his certainty and romantic pursuit soon win her over. She tells us she found him easy to love and when they married felt both secure and happy. With some sense of triumph Burden believed she was going to be the one to break her own family’s failed marriage mould.
At the start of her book we feel the confident joy both James and Burden take in their marriage, their children and their stability. But it is a credit to Burden’s excellent writing that both their families’ mistakes and disappointments increasingly cast a shadow over events. We learn that when James’ father had experienced humiliating financial ruin, he’d retreated from James and his mother, from life. James’ closest friend had overdosed. In the same way that Burden’s family pattern of unsustainable relationships was shown to be systemic, we note James had firsthand experience of parental detachment, and the abandonment and loss of loved ones.
As the book progresses I felt a sense of impending doom despite the breezy way Burden tells us about James’s insistence that she give up work to raise their three children. About his slips at work which needed her family’s connections to return him to professional steadiness. My heart began to sink heavily as I read about James’ desire for Burden to account for every penny she spent, his legal interventions to ensure that the houses she bought with her family money were in his name too. Burden offers us cheery justifications for some of James’s actions which seemed blatantly controlling, self-interested and potentially cruel.
In 2020, in the early days of the pandemic, James does break everything open. He leaves Burden and their two young girls in Martha’s Vineyard where they are sheltering (their son is staying with friends). He packs a bag and goes. Whilst there is shocking news of an affair – Burden is rung by the wife of his mistress with the information – James himself offers no explanation for his sudden departure back to New York. The shocks keep coming: after twenty years of marriage, he does not want to share custody; he wants no part in the care of their children; he wants no meaningful contact with Burden (months into their separation he sends her a text saying Happy Birthday! And it’s the exclamation mark, more than the brevity that kills her); he influences his family to cut her off too.
What Burden writes about next is startling, and if the extravagance of their lifestyle, the snubs at the tennis club, the fights over who should have the key to the private beach, are rather unrelatable, the sense of madness and sadness, of breaking down will be universally understood.
Burden gives credit to her family and friends who keep her going, who coax her into going for walks when she feels stuck to the bathroom floor, to the psychiatrist who provides her with tools to help her restore her sense of self. But even so, it is her own strength as she battles with incomprehension, unfairness, the loss of appetite not just for food but for life that is so touching. And so too is the great strength her two girls seem also to possess.
I am sure anyone who suffered depression during the extraordinary lockdown times of the pandemic (or, in fact at any time) or experienced the break up of relationships during that period when deprived of friends and family’s physical touch, of the proximity of purposeful diversion, will recognise the exquisite pain that Burden describes so perfectly.
How Burden manages to get back to her meaningful pro bono juvenile immigration work is impressive. How she keeps all three of her children going without, we are led to believe, totally denigrating their father. She may have the privilege of wealth to help her as a single mum, but she has the same battles as any other in terms of retaining sanity in the face of cruel legal fights, and the endless, deadening lack of explanation from James.
Throughout the book I wondered who the writing of it was serving. I believe it has been cathartic for the author. She tells us at the end of the overwhelmingly positive response she gets to the New York Times’ Modern Love essay that jump started the book (and important to note NYTimes would only publish with James’s approval which he, very interestingly, gave). And I can believe that she will have helped others in the telling of her tale. Its ability to be a unique and universal story is a real strength.
Burden tells too of the really nasty hate mail the essay (and presumably now the book) generated, the continuation of some hurtful social snubbing. She acknowledges this is one side of a story that James will not, it seems, be providing the other side of any time soon.
The renowned author Joyce Carol Oates has provided a quote for the book’s cover: she says, "Riveting... examines the very nature of intimacy.” And this is true too, there is a turning point towards the end when Burden wonders about what she and James kept private from one another, how much of themselves they’d wished to remain as a stranger to the other. She considers whether she knew there were parts of James that were chilly, cut off and afraid of financial disaster, and how hard she’d worked to make sense of that to herself, let alone talk to him about it.
So there is much that gets usefully considered as we reach the end of the book. However, whilst I was left believing this was not a revenge book, a missile lobbied from behind the barricades at a defenceless ex, I did, and do wonder about the children. They were young when their father walked out, the youngest was twelve years old. And now, they have a concrete version of events. They have access to (one side of) their parents’ happy as well as anguished intimacies. This might not be all bad, they may find the book a useful starting point for therapy, for their own intimate relationships, for reflecting on marriage and partnerships when the time is right. They may even become writers themselves and tell us how it felt for them. But no author or published book is an island - and in an age where to troll is merely the right to freedom of expression to some - I fear for the damage, as well as the healing that might be done by Belle Burden’s extraordinary book Strangers.
