Many KPCW listeners were introduced to Belle Burden’s searing heartbreak in her June 2023 New York Times "Modern Love" column. That column garnered such a tidal wave of response, the author has expanded her story into a brand-new memoir that is generating even more buzz than her column.
The heartbreak in Burden’s story grows from one partner in a marriage believing both are working toward the same life together and trusting the other completely, while the other is pulling away. “Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage” is written with brutal honesty, and exposes the author’s mistakes in full.
Burden, an heir of New York’s rich and famous, meets the love of her life and dives headfirst into the traditional role of full-time wife and mother, believing she is constructing the intact, loving family she lacked growing up. She trusts that her husband is, too.
When, at the beginning of COVID isolation, her husband leaves her and their three children behind with no explanation, no apology and least of all any consideration or kindness, she is left to figure out who it was she was married to and why nothing was as it seemed. This disconnect between the life she thought she was building and the mindset of the man she thought was her partner is illustrated on an afternoon when he comes back to the house to find some paperwork. While he is searching the files he asks her to make him a sandwich, so she begins making the very best sandwich she has ever made. As she makes it, she asks herself why she is doing that and all she can answer herself is to ask how he could leave someone who makes such good sandwiches.
This is a story of heartbreak. But it is also a cautionary tale of entering any close relationship without eyes wide open, "trust but verify."
“Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage” is available now at your public libraries.
