Strangers, a Memoir of Marriage by Belle Burden

 

Publisher:  The Dial Press

On Sale Date: January 13, 2026

Pages: 256

I reviewed a digital review copy from the publisher

In this moving and gripping memoir, author Belle Burden writes about how her happy marriage with her husband James fell apart all of a sudden, and the impact this had on her life.

Everything in Belle and James' life was perfect. They where 20 years together, they lived in New York City and also had a beachside home in Martha's Vineyard, where they spent the pandemic days, and they both had a very succesfull career at a law firm.

But then a phone call to her from a man unknown to her changed her life forever; the man announces to her that her husband James has an affair with his wife, a woman twenty years younger. After she confronts James with this, he admits and leaves her and the children for good. An icecold and very stressfull divorce process follows. Belle keeps wondering why James changed all of a sudden, he was always a loving and caring husband, it seems like he became a different person overnight that does not even want custody of their three children. She tries to navigate her new life and has to come to terms with the divorce, picking up the mental shards that James put her into, but society also gives her bad looks for, especially after she starts to write about it and gives an interview about it. She wonders if she did miss something along the road of her marriage, or did she do something wrong? James just walked away out of their marriage heartless, telling her that he was done. And a lot of questions remain unanswered for Belle.

Strangers is a very personal memoir about a topic many divorced women can relate too. It happens often that a man walks out of a marriage without a clear reason. The beautiful writing of the author puts the reader in her shoes after the cold divorce and the years after that. She also describes the gender mysogyny she experiences, mostly by men, who see James as the good one and her as the bad one, would the same happen if she had walked out? In this book you feel Belle's pain, worries, and confusion about what happened. This is a very honest personal and sometimes raw memoir, about a topic so many women have experienced. I truly liked how it was written and the pace of the writing, and how Belle tells her story. One of the memoirs to look out for in 2026!