Strangers is a memoir about how the author’s husband of 20 years shot out of their marriage like a bullet out of one of his hunting rifles without so much as a polite warning.
“I don’t know why he left. I don’t think I ever will.” Belle Burden
In its impeccably civilized way, Strangers is unnerving as hell.
I had pre-ordered Burden’s memoir when it was featured in the BBC’s list of the “40 Most Exciting Books to Look Forward to in 2026.” It “charts the collapse of a 20-year marriage … and is based on the author’s viral New York Times Modern Love essay.“ I hadn’t yet read the viral essay, but I did then because, as long-time CRUSH Readers know, I am obsessed with the mysterious ways of love, how it ebbs and flows, soothes in one moment and crashes the next.
Strangers arrived two days ago. I finished it in 24 hours.
In it, Burden wonders how a marriage that began with such evident alignment could vanish abruptly, without warning, two decades later. She tells us she had no idea that her long-term husband and father of their three children was dissatisfied in their marriage. He had never voiced even the smallest reservation about his family life. He walked out of their Martha’s Vineyard estate one morning during COVID, then texted her later to say “I thought I was happy but I’m not. I thought I wanted our life, but I don’t.” And later: “I feel like a switch has flipped. I’m done.”
With that, he swiftly gave up her, their life together, custody of their kids and, he said, both their homes. He never told her why. In response to her many attempts to get an explanation, he offered nothing of substance. “You’ll be fine,” he said, “you’re still young.” She was fifty, she writes.
The night before she had received a startling message from an unknown caller that said “I am sorry to tell you this, but your husband is having an affair with my wife.”
It all happened to her in less than twelve hours, the unraveling of her family.
I’ll admit I was suspicious of her contention — that she didn’t know anything was wrong in her decades-long marriage. How could a woman be so out of touch? If she didn’t know, I thought, it’s because she didn’t want to know. The signs are always there, I believed, if you’re paying attention. I have always been that woman who scoffs at divorced male friends who say that they “had no idea“ that their ex-wife was unhappy. And until reading Strangers, it had always only been men I’ve known who‘ve said that. Men who were too ultra-focused on their careers and their competitive extra-curriculars to pay attention when their wives told them they were unhappy, that they wanted things to change.
I read Strangers as if it were a mystery and I was a sleuth spotting clues the author herself had missed as to why her decades-long marriage suddenly, silently catastrophically collapsed. Burden, despite her obvious desperation to understand what happened, presents the facts fairly, painstakingly, often even generously toward her ex-husband, and in detail.
And if I’m being as honest as Burden herself is, I read it as if I had something at stake. If I were able to see what she hadn’t then I, it followed (as a widow actively out dating in her fifties), would be safe from her fate. I read it feverishly, as if reading it could somehow keep me safe from the dangers of loving somebody who turned out to be a stranger. Safe from future abandonment.
Any married woman reading Strangers might have the same gnawing fear in her gut, I imagine: “Could this happen to me?”
Belle and James’s (his name is a pseudonym) relationship began with a rush of intimacy. Their first date was in early July, they were engaged a month later on a whirlwind trip to Greece. Within three weeks he asked her to tell him he loved her. His need to tie things up speedily was, I thought, perhaps the first clue.
Also, I should admit, before reading Strangers, I didn’t know who Belle Burden is. She is a descendant of (and presumably heir to) both the Standard Oil founder and the Vanderbilts, the granddaughter of the swan, Babe Paley, and as high in the New York blue blood social pecking order as one could be. In contrast, while James appeared privileged, his own family had experienced financial disaster. He grew up on the Upper East Side among the super wealthy and socially prominent, but his family disintegrated with its wealth when his father fell apart.
While she doesn’t present it in a conclusory way, as she carefully lays out the facts it’s not possible to escape the feeling that their respective, divergent lineages and experiences were critical to their unfolding story. Precisely how is not explicitly defined, likely because Burden doesn’t know herself. But we know the precise way in which James experienced a traumatic childhood, she tells us that. We also know that he pursued her romantically after learning about her pedigree from an invitation he had received upon the donation of her father’s priceless collection of first edition texts to The Morgan Library. To what extent was his romantic interest driven by the economic and social stability she represented, in contrast with the trauma and chaos of his own? We don’t really know.
Perhaps the legacy most critical to their failed marriage, though, is not her pedigree but a family history of infidelity and divorce. In unsparing accounts, Burden breaks from what she describes as her natural reserve to detail a family legacy of gracious, high status women bearing up after the repeated, very public peccadilloes of their powerful husbands. There was her grandmother, the swan Babe Paley, and the many well-known adulteries of her prominent husbands William Paley and before that, David Mortimer. And then her own mother, Amanda Burden, both of whose prominent husbands, Carter Burden and Steve Ross, cheated on her with a string of women before the same thing happened with her long-time romantic partner, Charlie Rose.
A fellow Davis Polk attorney when they met, by the time he left her James had become the head of a successful hedge fund, not to mention an impressive tennis opponent who ran with a similar pack of high-powered male friends.
The reality of a marriage that wasn’t really what it appeared — to Burden, or the outside world — was patterned behavior, any armchair therapist would suggest. The legacy of a daughter and granddaughter observing the women in her family closely, internalizing and repeating their response to the shame of their husband’s infidelities. Of women ignoring, perhaps purposely diverting their gaze from, evidence of their own preordained, eventual betrayal. Of cleaning up the aftermath with discretion. And that’s the ultimate clue to what happened to Burden, I guess. If you can call it that. Her legacy of picking men like the women before her did, picking a man who followed in the footsteps of all of the many father and grandfather figures she had known.
By the end of the memoir, Burden has reclaimed a voice that was ceded, generations ago, by a line of gracious women before her to a chain of their respective commanding men. She has broken the cycle of being a passive figure who was swept along in the story written by a powerful partner. She has become the central figure in her own story. She does it, she says, in the hope that she has freed her children. She has taken ownership of her life, responsibility for her well-being, financial and otherwise. There is a point in Strangers when she finally stops asking James for answers to the unraveling of their marriage, answers that he has shown he is unwilling to provide. She turns, instead, to consider her personal history, her lifelong tendency to be compliant, her children, the life that remains.
Along the way, Burden sweeps us up into her drama. She brings us into her world in intimate, emotional detail. Even as we take note of the privileged bubble she lives in, we can see ourselves in parts of her story. And she creates suspense — not only by crafting the mystery of why her marriage failed, but also by cleverly setting up a cliffhanger around the couple’s prenup.
I wondered as the memoir wrapped up whether the memoir’s title might have multiple meanings. The obvious stranger is James. But is she suggesting that in many ways she had also been a stranger to herself? Over the course of the memoir, Burden gained so little understanding from her ex-husband, but she had gained immense insight into herself. She had transformed into a stronger, more confident version of herself.
That is the fix for all of us, I realized, as I closed the book.
Strangers is a riveting personal story of a life that unwound in dramatic fashion, a life that bears little resemblance to mine. Yet it’s a story that resonates because it reminds us to look inside to find the answers, to create safety by practicing trust in and care for ourselves. It is also, I believe, a warning that inviting strangers in close is dangerous, but the biggest danger is to be a stranger to yourself.
Read the full CRUSH Letter this story was featured in.
Dish Stanley
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