Book Summary and Reviews of Strangers by Belle Burden

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Cathryn_Conroy

Reading More Like a Novel Than a Memoir, This Is an Intimate Look at Failed Marriage
The demise of a marriage is almost always a tragedy. And the disintegration of the marriage of author Belle Burden and her pseudonymously-named husband in this tell-all, bare-all, confess-all book is tragic. But it also reads like a well-written celebrity gossip column with all the inside scoop.

While the book is a gripping page-turner, it also takes some deep breaths and maybe a few eyerolls before we readers can take it all seriously. You see, Belle and her ex-husband were/are uber-rich. Belle is an aristocratic heiress (the Vanderbilt family) with a trust fund and a Harvard law degree. And she's the poor one in the union! The Husband makes millions as a hedge fund trader, they own a posh New York City apartment, and a house on Martha's Vineyard with access to a private club and private beaches. The three children attend expensive private schools. It's all a bit much for the average Joe to behold. But once I got past the glittering riches, I found their love story to be enchanting, while how it all ended is heartbreaking.

They truly were in love. Married 20 years, Belle, The Husband, and two of their three children fled from New York City to their beach house on Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts in March 2020 when the Covid pandemic first hit. (Their son was staying with a friend whose parents—and those parents must now have a sure ticket to heaven—hosted a bunch of teenagers for months in their home.)

Soon after arriving on Martha's Vineyard, Belle received an ominous text message from an unknown number. The man writing the text informed her that his wife and her husband were having an affair, and his wife had just tried to kill herself. When Belle confronted The Husband, he confessed all and instead of saying it meant nothing, he left her. Just. Like. That. What's more, he refused to talk about it. He simply said, "I feel like a switch has flipped. I'm done." And he was. He not only didn't want anything to do with Belle, but also wanted nothing to do with their three children.

The book is then the details of what happened, who did what to whom, who said what to whom, and trying to figure out the biggest question of all—WHY?

Instead of being sordid, it's sympathetic. Instead of being hateful, it's haunting. Instead of being insipid, it's insightful.

Reading more like a novel than a memoir, the book is an intimate look behind the locked doors of a failed marriage and a life that is reborn and reinvented—albeit with the help of a lot of money in the bank.