Belle Burden's story of a collapsed marriage is very close to the bone

Once told by her social circle to quieten down and disappear, now Belle Burden’s book is being lauded as helpful to others who have experienced something similar, writes Laurie Morrissey

Burden's 'memoir of marriage' chronicles a woman’s quest to make sense of herself and her life after her husband of 20 years decides he no longer wants to be a part of the life they have built together. File picture

I am passing through the section of the book shop where there are a lot of giant, serious looking faces on book covers. 

It's the biography section, and my eyes are skimming over images of (mainly) men who are telling their stories of glory, of overcoming adversity and winning at all costs. I’m in search of a different kind of biography, Belle Burden’s Strangers which, in comparison to its neighbouring texts, tells a far more ordinary story.

This "memoir of marriage” chronicles a woman’s quest to make sense of herself and her life after her husband of 20 years decides he no longer wants to be a part of the life they have built together. 

He gives no reason (well, yes, there is the tiny matter of a fling, but this is something which the author believed they would work through) and up until he was leaving there had been no decipherable signs that her husband was unhappy in any way. 

So much so that, pitiably, while in the throes of the breakdown Burden looks down at her large, fluffy socks wondering vaguely, neurotically, if they could possibly be to blame. Burden’s love story, which she recounts beautifully, is a relatable tale of two people who fell deeply in love with each other. 

In the wake of her father’s sudden death she had wanted looking after, a relationship dynamic her now ex had eagerly embraced. She describes the simplicity of it all; “He wanted it, he wanted me. And then he didn’t”.

Having inhaled the book over two days, I asked friends if they had read it yet. Several came back to say they are terrified to do so. This book is confronting, to say the least.

As a stay-at-home parent myself, I felt the protagonist’s acute vulnerabilities in the wake of her marriage’s collapse like somewhat of a punch to the stomach. 

I could identify with Burden’s contentment at abdicating the majority of the financial decision-making to her financier husband and understand the financial gestures she made during the marriage, using her sizeable trust fund in ways which would bolster his ego but which almost ruined her in the divorce process. 

Like many women, she focused on raising their children while her husband focused on his career. The author has spoken about being trolled by 20-somethings appalled by her lack of agency and her willingness to abdicate her power to such a detrimental degree. She is a Harvard-educated corporate lawyer after all. 

Many of us who know the realities and the exhaustion of family life might be more forgiving. Particularly when, frankly, date nights make up less of the strategy for remaining happy together than committing to believe with all your might that the relationship will somehow be OK.

Burden writes of the shame she experienced as part of the process of her divorce, her sense of failure for not keeping her family intact. 

People in her social circle made it clear that she would be better off not writing about the matter and should desist from searching for the why of it all. 

Some acquaintances even accused Burden of being a bad mother in her pursuit of an understanding of what had happened. (And, by the way, we all want to know the why. I mean, is it a case of a mid-life crisis or was he a psycho-narcissist all along?)

Laurie Morrissey: 'As a stay-at-home parent myself, I felt the protagonist’s acute vulnerabilities in the wake of her marriage’s collapse like somewhat of a punch to the stomach.'

But it is surely more important to ask, as the author ponders throughout, why her husband’s abandonment of his family, to include any custody of his children, was not judged so severely?

While shy by personality, the author writes of her hunger to tell the truth, evocative of Elizabeth Gilbert’s “tell the truth, tell the truth, tell the truth” in the midst of her own heartbreak and as documented in Eat Pray Love, a book I lapped up as I came to terms with a relationship implosion of my own in my 30s. 

Exposing truths and acknowledging messiness is uncomfortable, but it is powerful and something which women, in particular, do so well in memoir. I am reminded of Nuala O’Faolain’s Are You Somebody and Sinead O’Connor’s Rememberings and how the depth of their honesty can only help people to unknot aspects of their own lives. 

Once told by her social circle to quieten down and disappear, now Burden’s work is being lauded as helpful to others who have experienced something similar.

Believe me, right now there is nobody reading this book who is not peering searchingly sideways at their partner. Might we become strangers too?

“Would you ever have an affair?” I randomly toss my husband a verbal grenade across the sitting room after the kids have gone to bed. “I think I have enough on my hands as it is, don’t you?” he tosses it back, barely looking up from his laptop.

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Of course, we could all do with being more prudent as we navigate close personal relationships. But what is entering into a relationship or having a family together if not the most earnest human equivalent of jumping off a cliff and blindly trusting (hoping) there’s a soft landing for you both? 

We all want to believe that those who flounder are somehow different to us. Burden shows that our only differentiation lies in how we survive.

• Laurie Morrissey is a writer