Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage

Wed, 17 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Belle Burden’s twenty-year marriage ended with a stranger’s voicemail. It was March 2020, the first days of the pandemic, and she had retreated with her three children and her husband, James, to their home on Martha’s Vineyard. Then the message arrived: “I’m sorry to tell you this, but your husband is having an affair with my wife.” The next morning James told her he wanted a divorce and drove back to New York, and his follow-up text set the tone for everything that came after: “I’ll answer what I want, when I want. I’ll speak when I want. I’ll decide when I want.” The heart of the memoir isn’t the affair, though. It’s how a single accommodation Belle made two decades earlier, to keep the peace before her wedding, became the tool that nearly destroyed her—and how the instinct to make it traced back through generations of women in her family.

Belle Burden on SummaryShelf

Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage