I’m not sure why but I’ve been very slow off the mark with memoirs this year. Ordinarily, I’d be at least ten deep by April – memoir is my favourite genre. Anyway, I picked up Strangers by Belle Burden (subtitle – ‘Memoir of a Marriage’) and I barely moved a muscle until I’d finished it.

Belle’s story is relatively straightforward – happily married to a man called James, three teenage children, an apartment in New York and a large house on Martha’s Vineyard. Belle had worked as a lawyer at a large firm where she met James. She left the practice after they married and had their first child, and in the meantime, James moved to working with a hedge fund (and was very successful). When COVID hit, the couple moved to Martha’s Vineyard and fell into the rhythm of slower days, cooking elaborate meals and long walks.

And then James announced he was leaving Belle.

The speed of our beginning and the speed of our ending felt like matching bookends. They both came out of nowhere. He wanted it, he wanted me. And then he didn’t.

No warning. No explanation.

He never told me, not once, that he was discontent in our marriage, unhappy with me, or struggling in our life together.

The caring, steady man Belle thought she knew so well was suddenly a stranger.

In the aftermath of his departure, Belle examines her marriage through a different lens, looking for the red flags that she assumed she had missed.

In many senses, there is nothing remarkable about Belle’s story. Yet, the way she has told it – you feel you are edging toward an explanation for James’s decisions – is gripping. James’s decisions regarding custody of the children and the splitting of assets are inexplicable.

He was abandoning all of it, and all of us.

What gives meat to the bones of this story is Belle drawing on her own family history of infidelity, and the way her mother and grandmother reacted when they were betrayed. It’s worth noting at this point that Belle’s maternal grandmother was Babe Paley. If that name sounds familiar it’s because Babe had a close, decades-long friendship with Truman Capote – Babe was one of his ‘Swans‘. Their friendship ended abruptly when Capote published ‘La Côte Basque, 1965‘ in 1975, a story revealing secrets about her husband’s affairs.

…my grandmother was devastated by the publication of the story, presumably because Truman had betrayed her trust and her privacy, which she guarded fiercely, and co-opted her life for his own purposes. She never spoke to Capote again.

Both Belle’s mother and grandmother were extremely accomplished women, who, to an extent (and within the context of the time) put their personal interests above all else. Belle felt this keenly as a child, aware of her mother’s various relationships and the lack of maternal attention that she craved –

I yearned, deeply, for a normal family, a stay-at-home mother, a lively household with many kids, a life with no divorces, no mean nannies, no split time, no loneliness. So, I became what I’d always wanted for myself: a mother who stood in the schoolyard, day after day, waiting for her kids, with chocolate chip cookies in her hand.

As Belle reflects on where her marriage went wrong, she wonders whether her abandoning her own career was the issue. The decision between motherhood and career is one faced by many women (and I’m sorry, you can’t have both perfectly, that was a lie sold to my generation – Gen X – and we’ve learnt the hard way). Belle doesn’t come to firm conclusions about this, but acknowledges that hindsight is a wonderful thing –

And doesn’t it all look different, wouldn’t your own story look different, if you knew how it was going to end?

I think the part of this memoir that I found the most compelling, was Belle’s description of her social situation after James had left. Her Martha’s Vineyard community was very much focused on couples (to the extent where their country club had complex rules about who gets to retain the membership should a couple split – in other words, fast-tracking the ostracism!) and she soon recognised that people took sides –

I learned quickly not to say too much, to censor myself. … With only a few sentences, I could step over an invisible line, becoming a stereotype: the bitter discarded wife ranting about her villainous husband.

However, this behaviour from others also assisted Belle in understanding her own identity (and how that had been changed or compromised during her twenty year marriage) and her role in the split –

My narrative was dependent on me being blameless, on James having no valid reason to leave. … Even with James’s assurance that it hadn’t been my fault, my greatest fear was still the simplest explanation: he left because of me. I hadn’t made James happy. Worse, I had made him unhappy. It may not have been any more complicated than that.

What is quite remarkable about this book is that Belle actually never plunges into bitterness or vitriol. Self-pity? Yes – there are a few early moments, and that’s allowable. Sadness? Yes. Grief? Yes. Confusion? Yes. Anger? Yes. Honestly, she allows James more grace than many would.

But what if the story I told myself wasn’t true? What if he always had a different story?

Strangers is superbly written (the frequent accounts of the family of ospreys near the Martha’s Vineyard house creates a nice parallel) and I think it will resonate with many readers.

4/5

James set up his home office on a card table in the living room, rising at 4 a.m. to worry over the markets. He cut three different kinds of wood and built gorgeous fires in the late afternoon. He made me whiskey sours as the sun set…