I’m in my audiobook era. Words I never thought I’d say. And it’s all because of a Threads post that told me to never, ever read Belle Burden’s debut novel, Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage. The responses to the post were polarizing–you either loved it or hated it. After seeing the author speak on Oprah’s podcast, and a listener comment that they had finished the audiobook in a day, I saw that as my challenge to finally try to listen to a book.

24 hours later, I finished Strangers. It helped that I listened to it at 1.5x speed.

I’ve been anti-audiobook for years. Often the voice I heard in my head for the character, especially if the book is written in first person POV, wouldn’t match the narrator’s voice. More often than not though, my mind would wander. I’d try to listen while driving, and ten minutes later, I’d realize I had been lost in my thoughts and missed an entire chapter.

This time was different. Maybe it’s because it was a non-fiction memoir, narrated by the author herself. I had no argument to stand on that stated the voice didn’t match the character… because in fact, it was her voice. Maybe it was the story. I was captivated from the start. It follows the story of a wealthy New York heiress who recounts the sudden, unexplained end of her twenty-year marriage when her husband walked out during the early days of the COVID pandemic. The story at times was shocking, my jaw literally dropped at one part… I gasped at other parts. I wanted to shake her and yell “What are you doing?! NO!” I felt sad for this woman, who I have never met, but knew she didn’t deserve this betrayal in her marriage.

People who hated the book will say the author is privileged, that it was the author’s fault, that she shouldn’t have been financially disengaged. Critics say that there was significant failure of self-protection. And of course, there’s three sides to every story. This just happens to be Belle’s, and we lack the full story without her ex-husband’s.

But hearing this woman open up and share her story, and the reclaiming of her voice, independence, and self-worth was inspiring to me. I love a success story and this one didn’t seem obvious at first.