StrangersA Memoir of Marriage
Belle Burden's memoir Strangers opens where most marriage stories close: a husband of twenty years walking out in the first weeks of the pandemic, no explanation offered. What follows is a careful, self-interrogating account of how little we can really know the people we sleep beside, and how much of a partner we build out of our own need.
From the review
The opening is almost too neat. March 2020, a house on Martha's Vineyard, the small rituals lockdown handed everyone: a fire in the afternoon, a roast in the oven, the drink poured at five. Then the man Belle Burden has been married to for twenty years tells her he's done, and the husband she thought she knew steps out of the picture as if he'd never been in it. Burden holds that contrast up to the light. The warmth of all that domestic detail sits right beside the suddenness of his exit, and the space between them becomes the question the book keeps chasing. If the ending came from nowhere, what had she failed to see?
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