Review: "Strangers" by Belle Burden

Strangers by Belle Burden
Published January 2026 via The Dial Press
★★★★

Burden had a picture-perfect life—a New York apartment and a summer house; an excellent education and legal work she enjoyed, but also the financial flexibility to be a stay-at-home parent; three kids; a happy marriage that had lasted almost twenty years. And then her husband walked away from it all.

Strangers traces their marriage, and the dissolution of it—the man she thought she knew, and the red flags that it just didn't occur to her to see, not in the context of a happy marriage. There are...a lot of labels that could be applied to her now-ex-husband; I'm reminded of A Beautiful, Terrible Thing, in which that author and her therapist decide that the ex-husband in question must have a personality disorder. But Burden applies none of those labels: She simply tells the story of what happened, and acknowledges again and again that she'll probably never know why.

It's a painful story to read. I had to put the book down briefly at around the 1/3 mark, because it was so clear that some financial decisions throughout their marriage were going to come back to haunt Burden. I say there were red flags, and there were, but: it's also so clear that she couldn't see the red flags for the green, and so clear that so many others also would have seen just the green. Also painful: Burden's discussion of people's reactions, both after her husband left and after she started publishing material about the split. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised, but it's still staggering to think how many people will tell women to hush, be quiet, take on his shame as your own. Talking about her life being torpedoed treated as something equally bad as, or worse than, her ex-husband torpedoing her life in the first place.

Burden is not vindictive here. I think it's fair to say that she's writing from a place of pain but also a place of healing, one where she can express how it felt but also see a way forward. And...I'll be honest. Burden is careful in how she writes her story, careful to strip out any remaining vestiges of anger, but I have no such compunctions; I am going to cheerfully hope that the publication of this book simultaneously sets Burden up financially and make's her ex's life a social misery. (Surely that's the barest of bare minimums due to a man who would intentionally, and for no apparent reason, abandon his wife and kids and then do his best to ruin them financially—something he seems to have been preparing for for years?)

A well-crafted story, and a reminder to be a decent person—in your own relationships, and when talking to people about theirs.

Thanks to the author and publisher for inviting me to read a review copy through NetGalley.