When the system finally stops working for you
Belle Burden's divorce memoir is compelling, but I kept getting stuck on how often she seemed surprised by dynamics she had been unusually well equipped to question.
I found Strangers genuinely interesting.
The premise is brutal. Belle Burden is quarantining with her husband and two of their children at their house on Martha's Vineyard in March 2020 when she gets a voicemail from a stranger telling her that her husband is having an affair with his wife. By the next morning, the husband Burden had been with for twenty years tells her he wants a divorce, packs a bag, and leaves.
It is easy to understand why that would completely destabilize someone.
What I had a harder time with was how often Burden seemed completely helpless in situations where, from the outside, she appeared unusually equipped to ask better questions.
She is not someone who had never encountered contracts, money, or powerful institutions. She went to Harvard Law School and worked as a corporate lawyer at Davis Polk. That does not mean she should have understood matrimonial law or predicted that her husband would leave her. But it made some of her choices harder for me to understand.
The prenup is the clearest example.
Before they married, James pushed to change their agreement so that income earned during the marriage would remain separate unless it was deliberately put into joint ownership. Burden's own lawyer advised her against the change. She signed it anyway.
Then, over the course of the marriage, she used money from her family trusts to help buy their New York apartment and Martha's Vineyard house and put both properties in joint ownership. James, meanwhile, kept much of what he earned in his own name.
She also let him take over the family's finances.
Again, I understand how these things happen inside a marriage. Trust is the point. You do not make every decision while imagining how it will look in a divorce proceeding twenty years later.
But Burden actually had more warning than most people do. She had a lawyer telling her the agreement was a bad idea. She had legal training herself. She knew enough to be uncomfortable with the prenup change, and by her own account she avoided talking about it with people who might have challenged her decision.
That is where my sympathy started running alongside frustration.
The same thing happened with the book's treatment of privilege.
Burden is very explicit that she grew up with enormous advantages. She comes from an extremely wealthy, prominent New York family. The marriage includes a Tribeca apartment, a house on Martha's Vineyard, private schools, inherited trusts, and a level of financial insulation most people going through a divorce could not imagine.
She knows this.
But there were still stretches where she seemed surprised by how power worked until it was being used against her.
The pandemic setting makes this especially visible. Her family escapes New York to an isolated house on Martha's Vineyard while hospitals in the city are overflowing. Burden acknowledges how lucky they are. At the same time, the book is so tightly centered on the collapse of her own sense of safety that the surrounding crisis often feels like scenery.
I had a similar reaction when she starts reexamining the women in her family after James leaves.
Her grandmother and other women she grew up around had endured infidelity, silence, and unequal marriages. Burden begins to see that history differently once the same kind of betrayal happens to her. That reflection is one of the more interesting parts of the memoir, but I also kept thinking: you had been surrounded by examples of this your entire life. Why did it require your own marriage exploding before you really questioned the arrangement?
That is probably the contradiction at the center of the book.
Burden's privilege protected her from a lot of consequences, but it may also have made certain systems feel benign because they had mostly worked for her. A husband managing the money could feel like being taken care of. A traditional marriage could feel safe. A restrictive prenup could remain theoretical. The social expectation that women absorb unpleasant things quietly could look like good manners.
Then the marriage ended, and all of those things suddenly looked different.
One of the strongest realizations in the book is Burden's eventual understanding that what she had experienced as protection could also be control. I believed that realization. I just sometimes wished the memoir pushed harder on why someone with her education, resources, and access to advice had been so willing not to look.
None of that made the betrayal less awful.
Her husband's behavior after the affair is cold enough that the book becomes genuinely difficult to put down. The abruptness of his departure, his refusal to give her a satisfying explanation, and the transformation from husband into legal adversary are all unsettling. I also respected that Burden does not turn him into a cartoon villain. She spends a surprising amount of time trying to understand what happened rather than simply prosecuting a case against him.
But I did not come away from Strangers thinking primarily about the danger of women trusting their husbands too much.
I came away thinking about how easy it is not to question a system when that system has mostly made your own life comfortable.
Burden eventually questions a lot of it.
I just found myself wishing she had done so before it happened to her personally.