A book review: Strangers

A book review: Strangers by Belle Burden

Strangers is a memoir of marriage and divorce that follows its author, Belle Burden, from childhood to marriage to motherhood and, finally, divorce. I won't pretend I loved it. I didn't. But it made me think hard about my own marriage, and that's worth something.

The book centers on her divorce and how it came about, with every detail of her childhood and experiences threaded back to it. The divorce comes out of nowhere: her husband walks out on her and their three children during the COVID-19 pandemic, after having had an affair. Throughout the book, Belle is on a mission to understand why and how it happened.

My problems with it start with the repetitiveness. James, James, James. The club, the club, the club. The club was the central plot, and I felt us circling James and the club over and over. They took up far more space in the book than they earned. By the end I wasn't learning anything new from returning to them; I was just returning.

And for a book built on a personal tragedy based on true events, it felt strangely impersonal. Belle details how she met James, that they were in love, the chronological order of the memories that built their family, and yet it reads like a fact sheet rather than a lived-in life. I wanted the texture. What did they write in their shared journal? How did James speak to his children? Did he call her from work? What did he find funny, and did he make her laugh? None of that is here, and its absence is why two people who were married for years still felt like strangers to me on the page. The other things that wore on me were the lack of depth, the writing itself (I feel bad saying this, so greg of me; a reference you'd understand if you read the book), and how heavily other people's opinions and community gossip featured as a theme.

I'll also say this: you, the reader, hold some control over your experience of it. If you want to read deeper into it, you can. And if you want to keep it at surface level, you can do that too.

But one thing stayed with me long after I closed it.

I liked the final chapter. There's a specific line Belle wrote describing the kind of love she'd had: "I hope they will fall in love with abandon as I did with their father."

It felt like the truest line in the whole book. To love with abandon, what a rarity. In today's world we're taught to build steel walls and approach everything with caution. Trust no one, especially not a man. But love, in its most honest form, is free-falling, wholehearted, with abandon. That is the state in which we experience real love. Then again, that's also what leaves you deceived, hurt, discarded; it makes you vulnerable to all things bad.

I've been so hurt before, wounds so jarring and deep it still pains me to remember, and yet I fell in love with my husband with abandon. I'm also afraid of going through what Belle did: to be left without explanation, discarded like a page you can turn over for good, or tear out and throw away. It's frightening to imagine happening to me. Shocking, unfathomable. But then I remember that this power my partner has is one I granted him, and just as I gave it, I can take it away. That, I think, was the climax of the ending. Belle took it back from James (her ex-husband), and that's how we arrive at this line. She wishes for her children to fall in love with abandon because, although it might expose them to great despair, they can get through it. It's the only way to experience all the fruits of love so intensely: real, raw joy. The risk is worth the reward, to me at least.

I also found profound meaning in how she ended her pursuit of understanding why James left. What had changed. What she did or didn't do. An explanation for the pain he'd caused her. The ending is that there is no explanation, and that's okay. She might never understand the why or the how, and that's okay. I've been there before, on a chase, an ever-exhausting, all-consuming hunt for closure. One I never got and never will. In hindsight, I regret the time I wasted dwelling, theorizing, trying to understand, because I never did. And I never will. But I eventually came to the conclusion that it's okay not to.

That's a shortcut I hope everyone who finds themselves in this situation takes, because it's worthwhile. It gives you back time you could spend on something grander and better. The only things we can control and understand are our own actions and ourselves, a far more rewarding pursuit than chasing the meaning behind other people.

One important caveat: the book drives home a lesson we hear in these horror stories over and over again, the importance of being financially independent. I heard it loud and clear, and I think that as women, we can't be reminded of it enough.

All in all, it was a quick read, but I didn't find it especially enjoyable or entertaining. I found it hard to finish, though I suspect it might land with far more impact for someone going through a divorce or a difficult breakup.