There is a specific kind of reading experience that feels less like reading and more like peering through a lit window into the neighbour’s house during a divorce. You know you should step back, but you can’t.
Strangers is Belle Burden’s memoir of the end of her twenty-year marriage, which collapsed at the start of the pandemic when her husband announced, with very little preamble, that he was done. Not just with the marriage but with the children, the homes, all of it. He walked away from his life the way an actor shrugs off a costume. The title earns itself.
Burden is a Harvard-educated NYU law graduate, granddaughter of Babe Paley, with homes in Manhattan and Martha’s Vineyard. She is extremely wealthy. She is also, in this book, extremely honest about the ways she let that wealth and that life insulate her from looking too closely at the man she was married to. She didn’t track the finances. She didn’t push back on a prenuptial agreement that her own lawyers told her was lopsided in his favour. She was, in her telling, “Belle the Good,” which are the most chilling three words in the book.
The writing is genuinely good. It reads like a thriller, tight and forward-moving, which is not what you expect from a divorce memoir about a woman with a second home on the Vineyard. Burden knows that. She’s aware of how her circumstances land for most readers and she doesn’t flinch from it. She writes about financial dependence with a clarity that transcends her specific tax bracket, because the dynamic underneath it isn’t rare. Rich or otherwise: you defer, you trust, you stop looking, and then one day you’re standing in a house you bought with your own inheritance wondering how you got here.
I finished it on a plane and immediately wanted to talk to someone about it.
I had watched Chelsea Fagan’s February video essay on it, and it added a whole other layer to what I’d read. Chelsea was sceptical, specifically, that a woman with Burden’s background, from a family of Ivy-educated lawyers, who was herself a lawyer, would have signed a prenup like that without fully understanding the implications. She puts the question plainly and, it turns out, not without reason. Since publication, reporting has emerged suggesting that Burden’s financial portrayal in the book doesn’t hold up entirely under scrutiny. The prenup that made her husband the villain of this story turns out to have left her considerably less destitute than the narrative implies.
Chelsea’s essay didn’t just raise questions about Strangers in isolation. It became the catalyst for a wider conversation, with other writers and critics picking up the thread and adding their own reporting. It’s worth watching before, or just after, you read the book. It sharpens everything.
It complicates things. The writing is still good. The emotional landscape is still real. But it’s worth knowing what you’re walking into.
If you liked:
- The Staircase
- Educated by Tara Westover
- Dogs, Boys, and Other Things I’ve Cried About by Isabel Klee