How well do you know the person lying next to you in bed?

IF YOU ENJOY a good yarn about a terrible husband, you have been spoilt for choice in recent years. Malevolent men are everywhere on television, thrillingly dependable in their awfulness. There was “Big Little Lies” (violent husband), “The Undoing” (murderous husband) and “The White Lotus” (depending on the season, fraudulent, greedy, and unfaithful husbands). In “Bad Sisters” four women try to rescue their sibling from not one but two psychopathic spouses. The men in “All Her Fault”, a recent mini-series, are either manipulative and deceitful or selfish and inept. Perhaps the #MeToo movement has moved into writers’ rooms. Whatever the explanation, these husbands seem to be emphasising the “worse” part of “for better or for worse”.

Now comes “Strangers”, a memoir that is at once a horror story, a record of suffering and a cautionary tale. Belle Burden (pictured below) begins her narrative in March 2020. With New York in lockdown, she has decamped to a summer home in Martha’s Vineyard along with her husband, James, and two of their children. They settle into a routine of cocktails and home cooking.

Then comes the jump scare. One evening, as Ms Burden is cleaning up after dinner, she gets a voicemail message from an unknown number. “I’m sorry to tell you this,” a man says, “but your husband is having an affair with my wife.”

At first James is regretful, offering Ms Burden assurances that the relationship is over and that the other woman “meant nothing” to him (a line that has been used in many a bad Hollywood movie and therapy session). But the next morning, his demeanour has changed. He is cold and implacable. He does not want their homes in Martha’s Vineyard or New York or even custody of the children. All he wants is a divorce. Ms Burden, stunned, had had no inkling that James was unhappy.

Around 40% of first marriages in America end in divorce. The division of assets is often fraught—and it is especially knotty here, as there are quite a lot of assets. Part of the fascination of “Strangers” is its glimpses into a rarefied elite. The author’s father was a Vanderbilt; her grandmother was Babe Paley, a socialite described by Truman Capote as “the most beautiful woman of the 20th century”.

Ms Burden used trust funds to pay for her family’s homes, but she put both hers and James’s names on the deeds to celebrate their union. So when James comes looking for their prenuptial agreement, alarm bells ring in the reader’s ears. In the end Ms Burden ends up with their homes in New York and Martha’s Vineyard (as well as their private beach on the island).

Women may recognise aspects of themselves in Ms Burden, her riches notwithstanding. Like many wives, she had ceded financial decisions and planning to her husband. “I had chosen not to look,” she writes. “I had chosen not to know.” Marriage had stymied her independence. After she had children, Ms Burden found it hard to balance a job and motherhood. She left paid work, sacrificing her career in order to support James’s ambitions as a hedge-fund manager. After the separation, friends imply that this may be why James left her, for “women become less interesting to men when they don’t work.”

Ms Burden is an elegant writer. To her credit, her crystalline prose is unclouded by spite. Her mother and grandmother were also betrayed by their husbands: she does not want to have to pretend, as they did, that she is having a good time with her bad husband. “Be brave. Claim it. Say it. Break the cycle,” she writes.

Today more people are willing to air and share their marital dirty laundry. In 2023 Ms Burden published an essay about her divorce as part of the New York Times’s “Modern Love” series. It went viral, and she was inundated with messages from people sharing similar experiences of abruptly severed unions. As “Strangers” and myriad tv shows attest, even the most intimate and long marriages can yield nasty surprises. In the end, how well do you really know the person who lies next to you in bed every night? ■