Do you think about divorce?
Strangers by Belle Burden and the WAY stranger stories I can tell you from my years as a divorce lawyer
I was a divorce lawyer for five years. I was only twenty-two years old when I started working at the firm and twenty-three when I was formally admitted to practice by the Supreme Court of Victoria, Australia.
I feel like a kid sniffing a Sharpie for the first time when I think about a day in the family court. What a fkn high! The drama was A) REAL B) extremely high stakes and C) played out in costumes.
I often regret leaving the profession but I won’t get into all that now. All I’ll say is that, within 5 years I saw some real life shit go down in the Commonwealth Law Courts of Melbourne between people who once committed to forever together.
I was privy to the story of a corrupt ex-cop cutting peeping-tom holes in his fifteen year-old step daughter’s bedroom while siphoning off government payments for his wife’s disabled son into his own bank account. I saw a very mentally unwell ex-husband turn up to court in a mini dress, fishnets and heels with what looked like last night’s makeup smeared down his pecks (which were exposed via a plunging neckline). I saw a carpenter fess up to contracting HIV from a sex worker and passing it on to his wife after blowing their entire life savings at the casino. I saw a man in his eighties complain about his nineteen year old mail-order bride from Cambodia crying too much since she started living with him. He was wildly disgruntled that she could only cook rice. Imagine! The girl from the ricefields can’t make a bolognaise sauce, how strange! There was even a story of a man on a farm caught by his wife, red-handed, fornicating with a pig he had sedated in their barn. He claimed (via a sealed affidavit, that is on record) that he was “showing the pig how it was done, because the female pigs were having trouble getting pregnant”.
I bet you think I am making some of this stuff up but I assure you – I am not. I could also keep reeling these stories off for several more paragraphs. Pages. Possibly an entire book (not a bad idea, tbh). I can only imagine the stories amassed by a family lawyer who stays in the game over a thirty or forty year career. It would be a very sad trunk stuffed with tales that force you to laugh, else you’d never stop crying.
It is truly an insane, sad, madhouse. But it’s also just people getting divorced, a mostly private affair between two individuals. As the old adage goes, no one really knows what goes on behind closed doors. But as a divorce lawyer, you’re allowed a front-row seat to it all. You open up not just your clients’ finances but also their deep, usually very well-hidden, agonies of the soul. Your profession is the crowbar that wrenches an average person’s box of secrets open.
Sometimes it would take a while for a client to unfurl their fist to tell me what I needed to know. Other times, they would come to me, safely swaddled in the knowledge that “legal privilege” would protect them (fyi- this is not actually always true! sometimes lawyers have to report things!) and start retching their stories out like a cat delivering a tangled, wet furball from the depths of its digestive tract. Sometimes it was way more information that I needed or was remotely relevant to their legal matter.
So you can imagine that when I saw Belle Burden’s “divorce” memoir, Strangers, popping up absolutely everywhere recently, I had to read it. Someone even described it as divorce-porn. SIGN ME UP! That’s my jam.
I’ve seen people describe it as chilling! devastating! unbelievable! Given the bevy of unbelievable stories I once bore witness to, I was ready for some hair-raising stuff. Gimme what you got Belle Burden! Her lineage obviously makes it more compelling reading than the average tale of two people splitting up. She descends from the Vanderbilts and her ex-husband is partner of a hedge fund in New York City – so we’re talking real, fuck you money. The kind we love to get the popcorn out for. However, given the reviews, I was sure this would be icing, rather than the cake itself.
I don’t want to be the kind of writer who shits on another writer’s writing but the prose left a lot to be desired. I feel even worse saying this because she literally talks about her creative wounds in the memoir. About “Greg” from her writing class telling her she couldn’t write for shit. How it haunted her! Held her back! Let’s just say, I don’t disagree with Greg. But then again, she has a bestselling memoir and I have a Substack nobody pays for, so who the hell am I to pass comment.
I put my reservations about the quality of the writing aside and tore through the book, hungrily galloping towards a pig-fucker, peeping-tom, sex-worker type story to unfold on the rarefied island of Martha’s Vineyard. When I turned the last digital page on my kindle I felt let down to say the least. This was just your average, bread and butter banker-cheats-on-wife-and-leaves-her-story. Of course this is a sad tale but it’s not a novel one.
There is a difference between telling a story and understanding a story. It seems like Burden just tells the story, from her perspective, beat by beat. I don’t feel a deft memoirist present, working hard at understanding where two (or many) truths meet, which is ultimately what makes for a masterful memoir. It should be an archaeological dig into the self to unravel the stories we tell ourselves. The writer should come to the surface with a collection of dinosaur bones they didn’t realise they’d been housing.
But maybe I’m asking too much of this little memoir. Perhaps it’s enough for this lady to beat her chest over a few hundred pages, striking fear into the hearts of married people the world over. Perhaps this book is a delicious war cry for anyone who has been unceremoniously left by their spouse. But if you’re looking for blockbuster drama or true, hard-fought insight, I’m afraid you might be left feeling lacking (as I was).
Although perhaps this book is exactly what the world needed – a voyeuristic peeping-tom hole into the dissolution of a relatively bog-standard marriage (minus the money). Perhaps a story of literal peeping-tom holes would simply be too much to bear, given the Epsteins and Pelicots of the world taking up what little capacity we have left for real horror.
Anywho, I’m going to get on with writing down all of those salacious stories… See you next week!
Like you, I was waiting for the dramatic punchline and the horror story at the end. I suppose that's what I've been conditioned to see in memoirs that receive this level of attention.
There were threads of her story that were familiar to me, and I am guessing other GenX women, which might explain the book's popularity. Things like questions around family and career choices made long ago, and how they have manifested over the years.
I agree with you, though, the language used to describe the book as "chilling! devastating! unbelievable!" is a bit much. At best, it's a simple reflection on a marriage gone sideways that sadly we see all too often.
i agree! the real JUICY stuff of the story was just their privileged life lol