Strangers
Belle Burden, 2025
A pandemic lockdown, a Martha's Vineyard house, and a marriage the narrator thought she knew. An intimate memoir about intimacy, money, and starting over. A quiet, reflective memoir that moves through memory and grief at walking pace, with a watchful, literary voice.
Feels like grief, hope and nostalgia. About memory, family and love.
Who it’s for
You may like it if you enjoy memoirs that sit with family memory, money, and the strange closeness of lockdown. The book's inward, pandemic-bound narration and long passages of observation may feel slow if you want a marriage story driven by outward incident.
Why read it
It gives you a close, thoughtful view of how lockdown can make money, intimacy, and old assumptions about a marriage newly visible.
A page from the book
The nest is empty, the world is closing, and the birds are still coming.
When we arrived on the Vineyard in March of 2020, the nest was empty. The birds were still warming themselves in the southern hemisphere, perhaps beginning their pilgrimage back to the island, making their way over the Caribbean Sea and Florida, continuing north, hugging the coastline, as a virus, first found in China, made its own explosive journey through the United States. My husband and I walked around the pole in our wool hats and parkas, our boots sinking in the marsh. The nest was intact, unchanged from the previous fall. Even in the bitter air, even with sharp sticks poking out of every side, it looked strong and stable. Welcoming. We smiled at each other and talked about the couple’s return. Would we be here to see it? Belle Burden.Osprey populations rebounded after DDT was banned in 1972; the birds are again a common sight over Martha's Vineyard.
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Questions readers ask
- Is Strangers for me?
- You may like it if you enjoy memoirs that sit with family memory, money, and the strange closeness of lockdown. The book's inward, pandemic-bound narration and long passages of observation may feel slow if you want a marriage story driven by outward incident.
- What is Strangers like?
- A quiet, reflective memoir that moves through memory and grief at walking pace, with a watchful, literary voice. Feels like grief, hope and nostalgia. About memory, family and love.
- What should I read after Strangers?
- If you liked Strangers, try Me (Katharine Hepburn), The Greatest Generation (Tom Brokaw) and The Year of Magical Thinking (Joan Didion).
A taste of the feed
A man writes a letter that is mostly a knife, and exactly correct about the sums.
Your income has always been ample, and you never ought to have borrowed any money, and Mary Towle did a great wrong in lending you any money. My opinion of you is the same as it always has been—that you are an extravagant, deceitful, dishonest, worthless person. You have squandered thousands of dollars and left your honest debts unpaid. But I do not think you are capable of comprehending the mistakes that you have made. Now that you are paying up Mary Towle, how would it do to pay the various other accounts that you owe?
Me · Katharine Hepburn
There is a kind of crying that only happens where nobody can hear it.
Everything else about the three-years-ago scene was different, though. That time, I was not in Rome but in the upstairs bathroom of the big house in the suburbs of New York which I’d recently purchased with my husband. It was a cold November, around three o’clock in the morning. My husband was sleeping in our bed. I was hiding in the bathroom for something like the forty-seventh consecutive night, and—just as during all those nights before—I was sobbing. Sobbing so hard, in fact, that a great lake of tears and snot was spreading before me on the bathroom tiles, a veritable Lake Inferior (if you will) of all my shame and fear and confusion and grief.
Eat, Pray, Love · Elizabeth Gilbert
The way a mother cuts meat, relearned from a stranger on YouTube.
Maangchi peeled the skin off an Asian pear with the giant knife pulled toward her, just like Mom did when she cut Fuji apples for me after school on a little red cutting board, before eating the left-over fruit from the core. Just like Mom, chopsticks in one hand, scissors in the other, cutting galbi and cold naengmyeon noodles with a specifically Korean ambidextrous precision. Skillfully stretching out the meat with her right hand and cutting it into bite-sized pieces with her left, using kitchen scissors like a warrior brandishes a weapon.
Crying in H Mart · Michelle Zauner
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