Confessions of a New England divorcee

No breakup tales elicit greater fear than those involving a partner who walks out without warning and does not look back. Is it really possible to sleep next to someone for decades and for them to remain unknown?

In Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage, Belle Burden uses her years as a lawyer to relitigate her marriage from inception to implosion, searching for the signs she had missed. One morning, a few weeks into the first Covid-related lockdown of March 2020, Burden receives a call from a stranger who says her husband, here renamed James, is having an affair with his wife. She confronts James, who tells her the affair is over, that he is deeply sorry and embarrassed. But at 6am the following morning, he walks fully dressed into the bedroom of their holiday home in Martha’s Vineyard, south of Cape Cod in Massachusetts, and tells her he is leaving. “I thought I was happy but I’m not,” he says. “I thought I wanted our life, but I don’t.” He wants neither custody of their three children nor ownership of their properties; he gives no other explanation than that, after 20 years of marriage, he has simply changed his mind.

The days that follow tick by with the rising paranoia of a psychological thriller: Strangers is in part a horror story about the very rich. Burden’s haunted house is a sprawling property with double doors and vaulted ceilings christened Meadowpath. Here, their eldest daughter makes homemade gnocchi and James shakes whiskey sours at sunset. But just as the whiskey didn’t ward off the Covid virus, as they hoped it would, this gilded mise en scène cannot protect their marriage. Instead, the double-edged sword of privilege cuts deep after the couple splits. In scenes that feel made for a glossy HBO adaptation starring Nicole Kidman, Burden finds herself uninvited to couples’ dinners, avoided by married men, and whispered about on sweeping lawns.

But as Burden winds back the tape, it becomes apparent that certain warning signs were there all along, though perhaps they only became apparent in retrospect. One comes when James proposes under the clock at Grand Central station in New York with a sapphire ring. “Nothing bad will ever come of this,” he tells her after she accepts, words that bring to mind the alarming tenor of a robocall telling you to transfer your life savings to a designated safe account.

Real financial manipulation follows when James pressures her into altering their prenuptial agreement so that he has equal claim to assets she bought with her inheritance, while keeping in his sole possession the millions he made as a hedge fund manager. Knowing how the story ends, it is easy to see Burden’s decision to marry as naive, in the same way her signature on the prenup now looks “innocent and hopeful”. Yet Burden argues a good case for why she had no reason to doubt the man she loved. Until she did.

I read most of Strangers on a single plane journey, a frictionless experience that felt closer at times to scrolling through a cascade of personal details. Turning each page was like clicking “See more” at the end of a lengthy social media caption; the text expanding with my desire for further information.

The book comes amid a wave of “tell-mine” divorce memoirs by women who write as though they have been deprogrammed from their indoctrination into marriage. But Strangers seems to share more DNA with an older mould of breakup books: as in Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat Pray Love, Burden’s open, confessional narrative feels like a story told in a single breath while the reader is seated across from her at her kitchen table. We track Burden’s recovery journey through metaphors found in nature: the wide loop she walks to the beach, taking a few more steps every day; the life cycle of the ospreys that return to a nest on the property each year.

The same birds appear on the book’s cover, positioned in opposition like the couple, echoing Burden’s description of “the speed of our beginning and the speed of our ending” as like matching bookends: “they both came out of nowhere”. It is a clever way to conjure a sense of fleetingness, but as often in the book, it feels as if Burden is reaching for neat imagery instead of delivering genuine insight.

Strangers started as an essay for the New York Times’s Modern Love series, and in its expansion Burden focuses less on her sudden abandonment than on the forensic search for James’s motive. The discoveries she makes are useful amulets for readers looking for protection from the idea that this could happen to anyone, but Strangers is a personal family history, not a universal story. We learn that betrayal is her inheritance: her mother suffers “the disappointment of unfaithful men”, as does her grandmother. James, too, seems doomed to repeat the pain of his childhood, though the family secret about his father walking out is his “third rail, a piece of him I could not go near”.

Burden’s grandmother was Babe Paley, an American magazine editor, pre-eminent socialite and one of Truman Capote’s circle of close female friends whom he referred to as his “swans”. Paley confided in Capote the secret of her husband’s infidelity, and he betrayed her by using it in his short story La Côte Basque, 1965. In March 2024, Burden wrote a piece for the New York Times describing her anguish at seeing a false depiction of her grandmother’s story in Ryan Murphy’s TV series Feud, in which Naomi Watts played Paley. “What I wish more than anything is that my grandmother had lived long enough, and been bold enough, to tell her own story, claiming it before anyone had the chance to steal it from her,” she said.

Burden considers her mother and grandmother, women who “had forgiven these men” and “quietly cleaned up the mess”, in her decision to publish the Modern Love essay. Later, as her country club friends press her on whether she is seeking catharsis or, even more insultingly, revenge, she has to remind herself: “These are people who do not speak about private things.”

The book, Burden says, is an attempt to “break the cycle” in the hope that by talking about her marriage, she will have “stopped something”. She is also doing what her grandmother did not: seizing her narrative before anyone else can steal it.

Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage by Belle Burden is published by Ebury Press, £18.99. Order a copy from The Observer Shop for £16.14. Delivery charges may apply

Photograph by Tara Wilson: Belle Burden's husband James, left, their daughter Evie, far right, and friends on Lake Tashmoo, Martha's Vineyard, 2010