Strangers by Belle Burden

There are books you enjoy, books you learn something from and then, occasionally, a book finds you at exactly the point in your life when you need to read it. For me, Strangers by Belle Burden was that book.

I was going through a divorce when I read it, and there were moments when it genuinely felt as though Belle had written this book for me. Our lives and circumstances are obviously very different, but so many of the emotions she describes, the shock, the questions, trying to understand how somebody you knew so well can suddenly feel like a stranger, and then having to navigate the practical reality of divorce while you’re still processing what has happened, felt incredibly familiar.

More than anything, reading it made me feel less alone. Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage tells the true story of the collapse of Belle’s 20-year marriage. In March 2020, as the world was entering the uncertainty of the pandemic, Belle believed she was secure in a happy marriage with her husband and their three children. Then everything changed.

She discovered her husband was having an affair and, the following morning, he told her that he wanted a divorce. The man she had spent two decades building a life with left, and Belle found herself trying to understand not only what had happened to her marriage, but who the person she had been married to actually was. That feeling of being blindsided is something Strangers captures incredibly well.

When the life you knew disappears

One of the hardest things about divorce is that the person going through it can be dealing with two completely different things at the same time. There is the emotional side: grief, anger, disbelief, fear and sometimes the almost obsessive need to understand what happened. Then there is the practical side.

Money. Children. Houses. Lawyers. Bank accounts. Documents. Who owns what. What happens next. What you are entitled to. What you aren’t entitled to. Decisions have to be made about things you may never previously have imagined needing to think about. And somehow you’re expected to deal with the second list while you’re still trying to process the first.

I know from my own experience how much you learn when you suddenly find yourself navigating divorce. Things I had never needed to understand before became things I absolutely needed to understand. That is one of the reasons Belle’s story resonated so strongly with me.

She had stepped away from her legal career to raise her children while her husband’s career progressed. Despite being a Harvard graduate and a qualified lawyer herself, she writes about how little she knew about some aspects of their finances and what that meant when the marriage ended. There is a lesson in that which I think every woman should hear.

Financial freedom matters

I don’t think financial independence should only become important when a relationship is in trouble. It matters when a relationship is wonderful too.

Nobody gets married expecting to divorce. You build a life together because you believe you’re going to remain together. Trusting your partner isn’t foolish and being financially aware doesn’t mean you’re secretly planning for your marriage to fail. The two things can exist together and I wish I had personally realised that.

Women should know what they have. We should understand the household finances, know where important documents are, understand mortgages, pensions, savings, investments and debts, and have access to money of our own. And I think we need to talk about this without making women frightened of marriage.

This isn’t about expecting the worst from somebody you love. It’s about retaining some financial independence and understanding the life you’ve helped to build. That is something I have learned myself.

Divorce has taught me an enormous amount about finances, legal processes and the importance of knowing exactly where you stand. There are things I understand now that I wish I’d understood years ago. You don’t know what you don’t know until suddenly you need to know it.

You are not the only woman going through this

The other reason I wanted to recommend Strangers is for the woman who is currently at the beginning of all of this. Maybe you didn’t see it coming. Maybe your husband has told you he wants to leave and you feel as though the floor has disappeared underneath you. Maybe you’ve discovered an affair. Perhaps you’re months into solicitors, financial disclosures and negotiations and you’re exhausted by the whole thing. Or perhaps the divorce is technically over but you’re still trying to work out who you are on the other side of it.

Reading somebody else’s experience doesn’t fix any of that. But it can make it feel less lonely. That was what this book did for me.

There were parts where I recognised the bewilderment of trying to reconcile the person you thought you knew with the person you are now dealing with. There were other parts where Belle’s experience was completely different from mine, but the emotions underneath it were still recognisable. And gradually, the book becomes about something more than the end of a marriage. It becomes about finding yourself again.

Belle writes about moving from being the quiet, accommodating woman she had been for much of her life to finding her own voice. Interestingly, she has since said that she doesn’t believe she was a fully realised person during her marriage and that, with the benefit of time, she is now glad the divorce happened. I found that incredibly hopeful.

Not because divorce is something to celebrate when you’re in the middle of the pain of it, but because there is life afterwards. You learn. You change. You become more independent. You discover what you’re capable of because, quite frankly, sometimes you don’t have much choice but to get on with it. And eventually you realise you’re doing it.

My verdict

★★★★★ 5 out of 5 stars.

This is probably one of the most personal recommendations I will make in The Daily Round’s Care Library. I loved Strangers, but I also needed Strangers.

Reading it while going through my own divorce made me feel less alone at a time when I needed that reminder. Belle’s circumstances are her own and mine are mine, but there is something universal in suddenly having to reconsider the future you thought was already mapped out.

It has also reinforced something I now feel incredibly strongly about: women need financial freedom. Know your finances. Understand what you own. Understand what you owe. Have money that you can access yourself. Ask questions. Learn about the things you’ve previously left to somebody else. Not because your marriage is going to end. Because your financial security matters regardless of whether it does.

And if you are reading this while going through a divorce yourself, I hope Strangers gives you a little of what it gave me. The knowledge that somebody else has sat in that confusion, asked those same questions and wondered how on earth they were going to navigate what came next.

You are not the only one.

Recommended by Jill Hudson, Editor-in-Chief, The Daily Round