STRANGERS: A Memoir of Marriage, by Belle Burden
The story of “Strangers” is a cliché of well-to-do Manhattan: Husband makes gobs of money. Wife, despite her august educational pedigree, stays at home to raise the kids, relinquishing career and otherwise idling in the make-work realm of school boards and volunteering. Husband has an affair and walks out. Marriage and all the timeworn rituals of intact family life are functionally over.
Except. The author is Belle Burden, a Harvard-educated lawyer with deep roots in American society — and her 20-year marriage, which seemed idyllic, ended seemingly out of the blue and against the panicky backdrop of the first weeks of the pandemic.
Burden’s memoir, which springs from a widely read essay published in The New York Times, describes a fantasy land of wealth and success — perhaps most enviably, her stable and happy marriage. The world Burden inhabits with her husband, James (she has changed his name here, but apparently not too much else), is one of Edenic privilege. They live in multimillion-dollar homes in New York and on Martha’s Vineyard, belong to private clubs, have keys to private beaches, kids in private schools.
The end of the marriage, when it comes, is quick and decisive: James asks for a divorce at dawn the day after she learns of a brief affair. One day, he is a man who loves his wife and has just bought a terrifically expensive mattress for their bed. The next he tells her, his eyes narrowing into a shape she had never seen before: “I thought I was happy but I’m not. I thought I wanted our life but I don’t.” He tells her she can have everything, including custody of the children. “I don’t want it,” he says. “I don’t want any of it.”
“I knew nothing,” she writes, “only the shock of his disappearance.” And that is total: James buys a two-bedroom apartment in the city — surprisingly small for a man with three kids. “I still thought he would want to make a home for his children, that he wouldn’t follow through on his decision to have no custody and no overnights,” she writes. But no. He converts the second bedroom into an office, assuring that his ghosting feels complete.
While “Strangers” is not necessarily about privilege and status, those are, inescapably, Burden’s worlds. Her father, Carter Burden Sr., was a handsome scion of the Vanderbilt dynasty. Burden’s mother is Amanda Burden, herself the offspring of Mortimers and Paleys, notable American families; her grandmother was Babe Paley, a Truman Capote swan and one of midcentury America’s most celebrated society figures.
It is striking in many ways how 1950s-housewife Burden’s story can seem. She and James, by her account, never discussed who would work and who would take care of the kids; it was an unspoken bargain. Once they have children, she hands over every aspect of their finances to him.
It all seems strangely dependent, especially for a woman so recently employed at a white-shoe Manhattan law firm. But that’s how life works inside the world of trust funds and family wealth offices, one gathers; there’s a degree of expectation that the world will automatically take care of you.
Burden’s prose reflects both her legal training and her exacting care with language, as if she is acutely aware of how closely her social universe will weigh each sentence. At moments, though, I laughed out loud, as when her soon-to-be ex, after telling two of their children about the divorce, asks her to make him a sandwich. Her hands shaking, she starts toasting bread and slicing avocado. “If I’m doing this, I’m going to do it well,” she tells herself. After all: “How could he leave a wife who made such good sandwiches?”
When her essay is first published, some friends — by now, I pray, mere acquaintances long in the rearview mirror — suggest that it’s about revenge. But “Strangers” is about something else: remaining seen after a marriage dissolves, and being present for children when the other parent functionally disappears.
There’s a real deftness and bravery to this refusal. It is as if Burden is offering her children a passport out of this stiff-upper-lip WASP universe and toward a place where people love one another openly, insist on intimacy and are unafraid of being deeply seen.
I know a woman, a successful writer, whose husband left her abruptly, and as he walked out the door he said with an eager, flashing little smile, “Someday you can write a whole book about me.” And she sat there and thought to herself: I wouldn’t waste a minute of my life honoring that man with my craft.
And so as I read “Strangers,” I felt occasionally disturbed: Would James feel celebrated by all her effort? But for Burden, the right decision was to not stay quiet. Their whole lives were too quiet. She has artfully loosed herself from the true stranger in their marriage, and we can merely wonder if he remains a stranger to himself.
STRANGERS: A Memoir of Marriage | By Belle Burden | Dial Press | 256 pp. | $30
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