Book Review: Strangers by Belle Burden

So much bad money behavior in this book

Like everyone else, I also read Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage by Belle Burden earlier this Spring. You can’t look away from this book because the financial and emotional car wreck of a privileged New York/Martha’s Vineyard family is just so rubberneck worthy.¹

Burden is very good writer. The strongest moments are her ability to examine her own thoughts in the midst of tremendous emotional trauma. I’m going to discuss the parts of Strangers that stood out for me but if you haven’t read the book yet and you plan to and you don't want any SPOILERS - DON’T CONTINUE TO READ THIS POST.

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Ok, I’m assuming you’re not worried about Spoilers from here on out.

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My interest, at least for this space, is the depiction of terrible financial behavior within a married couple. Burden’s ex, pseudonymed James² in the memoir, is portrayed by her as a kind of financial monster, laser-focused on financial chess against her while she is left playing a childish and losing game of financial checkers. Despite her initial familial privilege and wealth, he seemingly has the power to leave her, plus their three teen children who he has renounced, with very little.

The voyeuristic aspect of this memoir is easily understood: Here in Chapter 1 is a highly-educated New York couple with three children and a perfect life. They enjoy their Martha’s Vineyard getaway house and private tennis club membership. She comes from old money and he has bootstrapped his way to a highly-lucrative legal career. She has given up her high-powered legal career to focus on raising the kids. Perfection is shattered in the first chapter, however, when James announced he is leaving. Further, he doesn’t want to retain any fatherly connection to the children.

As the separation hardens into a bitter divorce, James plays extreme hardball with the division of assets. Burden herself had raided her family trusts to pay for their valuable real estate during their marriage. Because of the peculiarities of their pre-nuptial agreement, James had rights to half of their shared real estate property while she did not have rights to half of his financial assets earned during the marriage.

Financial lessons abound.

Belle Burden herself

She comes from wealth but manages to render herself nearly financially helpless. The Ex, James, is a bad guy it seems, but at various times while I read this I thought “Come on Belle! You cannot be this naive.” But, as she describes herself in great detail, she was that naive. This is the central story of Strangers.

She was plenty smart enough to go to law school and plenty hard-working to begin a high-powered law career. But once she gave that up she seems to have abdicated any financial responsibility for herself or her children. She has stated in interviews in support of the book that a central goal of the memoir is to warn other women not to make her mistakes.

In her telling, she simply turned over all financial responsibility to James. She shows a remarkable lack of curiosity about money. She has an amazing lack of agency in many respects, but particularly about her finances. This lack of curiosity and agency would be devastating to regular people.

There is ultimately enough money in the background of her life that she will be fine. But only because of the millions upon millions underwriting her financial ignorance. Most of us would not survive this level of abdication of financial responsibility.

Burden’s father

He came from money.³ And he fits the archetype of the wealthy heir who greatly enjoys the privilege of money, while having never felt its scarcity. On his death, Burden is shocked to learn that his business debts have put his widow (Burden’s step-mother) at risk of ruin. He dies with tens of millions of dollars of business debts, a fact never openly discussed with his own wife, outside of some “lighthearted jokes” about how his business might someday ruin them. Again because of privilege, his widow and Burden’s family are not ruined, but it’s not due to any careful plan of her father’s.

Babe Paley, shown here, is Belle Burden’s maternal grandmother

He is a collector of old books and art - with apparently considerable taste and talent in that direction. But he isn’t terribly interested in maximizing his gains from his collections nor on economizing. She mentions valuable art that he sold too early.

We can imagine and observe that Burden herself took lessons on money from her privileged dad. Money flows easily. Money is nearly unlimited. Money does not need to be tracked or marshaled carefully.

Burden’s Ex-Husband James

We get the least rounded picture of “James.” His depiction as a sudden “Stranger” to Burden after 20 years of marriage is the central mystery of the memoir.

We get enough clues to his financial neurosis, however, to notice: He seems extraordinarily, bizarrely, toxically, motivated by money. Or more precisely the fear of loss of money. We never really get inside his head but the picture I kept coming up with was of an emotionally-stunted hedge fund guy whose prime motivation, in life, is to maximize his financial opportunity. He acts like a cartoonish villain n his hardball financial negotiations with Burden. Is it realistic? If her depiction is to be trusted then he is an emotional cripple who would thrive in a hedge fund environment and almost nowhere else in which a normal range of human emotions might matter.

What’s strange is that Burden did not notice this aspect of him, or this version of him, before he decided to leave her and her children. We only have her perspective though, so that’s where the reader has to land.

The family enjoyed a second home on Martha’s Vineyard (not this one)

An alternative narrative would be that he had some kind of psychotic break⁴, in which there was a fully-actualized human James in the pre-divorce days who could be a loving husband and father, and there was a stunted-human James in the post-divorce days who could only try to maximize his financial situation as the expense of almost everything else.

Burden spends the memoir closely examining her shock, totally blindsided by post-divorce James. There are few clues to the link between pre-divorce and post-divorce James. But there is at least once big clue.

At some point in her narrative, almost as an afterthought, she mentions the obsessive care which pre-divorce James required her to take with respect to spending on the family credit card.

At this point in the anecdote she is a stay-at-home mom and he is a high-earning hedge fund guy, and as a family they maintain the home in Tribeca, NYC and also in Martha’s Vineyard.