Things were fine. No, things were great. They had three lovely kids, an apartment in New York and a home on Martha’s Vineyard. Sure there was a global pandemic just starting to show its teeth, but they could weather that storm – they had weathered others before. And then came the phone call, the departure at dawn, and everything changed.
I wish I could tell you that this is fiction, but the rawness of Burden’s memoir is stark in its lived, human experience as she unpacks how a marriage of over twenty years fell apart in a single night. At a time when the world was shutting down, hers was turning upside down as she navigated solo parenting, finances, and fracturing social circles. There was one point, with about an hour left in the audio book, where I found myself wondering “why write this?”. As if in answer, the story concludes by showing the power of honesty in breaking with unhealthy relationships while challenging the narrative that to tell your side of a story is to be vindictive or must be cathartic. Burden also encourages the reader to have grace for the whole lived experience that shapes a person past our understanding, even and especially in the case of her ex-husband. In many ways, this message felt like the basis of the title – that we are all shaped by myriad experiences, and the extent to which we unpack and acknowledge them is the extent to which we are known.
Since the publication of Strangers, a New Yorker article examined the specifics of the divorce and Burden’s finances, illustrating that, even without her ex-husband’s income, she was far from destitute. Some of the articles written about this insight question why Burden’s fans don’t reject her based on this apparent fabrication of the truth, on the basis that she hyperbolized their financial woes, and for me it comes down to two points. One, the basis of the book to me is not the financial desertion but the relational one. Two, I think there’s a lot of murk when the term “assets” starts getting bandied about; I don’t know the day-to-day of their lives and I don’t need to. The money is obviously an element of the story, but it wasn’t, to me, the story.
It’s a hard read but a good one, well written in its examination of life, relationships, and starting again.
2% Rating: 8.5
Recommend? If you’re a memoir reader, yes
Re-Read? Probably not
Time: 1:41