Vineyard Author’s New Memoir Dissects a Divorce

Belle Burden takes comfort in the predictability of nature’s rhythms. In April, the light grows longer, lily of the valley blooms and a family of ospreys returns to their nest next to Ms. Burden’s seasonal home in Vineyard Haven.

For years she has watched this scene unfold, finding solace in the movements of her avian neighbors. But it became especially important to her in 2020 during Covid, when her husband of 20 years suddenly left her, leaving Ms. Burden quarantined on the Island with her kids.

The story of her divorce — and Ms. Burden’s subsequent efforts to reshape her life — became her best-selling memoir Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage, published in January. Built out from an essay published in the New York Times’ Modern Love column, the book recounts the emotional and financial turmoil caused by her divorce and the ultimate freedom she found in the aftermath.

“I do feel like my life changed so much in the last six years in unexpected and sad ways, but also in ways that I’m really incredibly grateful for,” Ms. Burden said in a recent Zoom interview with the Gazette. “To have a life as a writer is something I just never expected, and to find joy in being on my own and being fully in charge of my life has been really wonderful. But it’s been a big change.”

That change began in March 2020 when, in lockdown with her family at their summer home in Vineyard Haven, Ms. Burden listened to a voicemail from an unknown caller. Ms. Burden’s husband was having an affair with the caller’s wife, the man said in the message.

While initially apologetic, her husband soon became cold and unresponsive. He did not want custody of their children, then 12, 15 and 17, and refused to explain why he no longer wanted to be a part of their lives.

“I felt like I had hit this emotional rock bottom, which for me was literally the bathroom floor,” Ms. Burden recalled. “It felt like every pillar of my life came crumbling down — the things I depended on, my then-husband, my place in the social world, my sense of financial security.”

In her book, Ms. Burden recounts her early relationship with her ex-husband, a seemingly perfect love story between two successful lawyers. She pairs the story with a description of osprey mating patterns — the male osprey’s “sky dance” to woo the female. The couple met while working at the same firm in New York City, two years after Ms. Burden’s father died.

“There was something both comforting and almost romantic about him coming in and saying, ‘I’m going to take care of you,’” said Ms. Burden, who works part-time as a pro-bono lawyer on juvenile immigration cases. “That is something I really had to wrestle with, like, why is that romantic? Is that something that was ingrained in me because of how I viewed my father? Is that cultural conditioning over centuries?”

Ms. Burden let her husband take control of the family’s finances, while she paused her career to care for her family. In the book she reflects on gendered marital roles and expectations, many of which she absorbed from watching the older members of her family, prominent socialites descended from the Vanderbilts and Paleys.

While she is factual and fair in the book — a product of her legal training, she said — Ms. Burden hopes her story is a lesson for other women, and especially her children, about retaining individuality and equality in marriage.

“Even in a kind marriage you can lose essential parts of yourself, you can move away from true equality, both financially and around career, around talents, around passion,” she said. “There are some themes in this about male entitlement and ways in which we are encouraged to be quiet and to be silent about male behavior.”

After her divorce was finalized, Ms. Burden began to write — something she had not done in any creative capacity since college.

“I got that spark again, wanting to write,” she said.

She wrote about her divorce, crafting an essay that was eventually published in the New York Times’ Modern Love column.

She also wrote a piece about ospreys that she incorporated into her memoir as a framing device. Each part of the book begins with the Vineyard ospreys, who she had once cherished with her husband.

Ms. Burden watched, in the months following her divorce, as the osprey couple returned to the nest, as their eggs hatched and three chicks learned to fly.

There was sadness in watching the osprey family thrive, the male osprey helping feed its chicks, as her own marriage fell apart, she said. And there was more grief when the ospreys left in September, “that melancholy that sets in, in the fall.”

Ms. Burden is experiencing that melancholy in a new way this year as her youngest child heads off to college. But being an empty nester means she will have more time to spend on the Vineyard.

Ms. Burden first fell in love with the Vineyard during a “ramshackle summer” in college, when she lived with seven other girls and worked for Crossland Landscape. The girls would wake up at 6 a.m. to mulch, weed and ride around in the back of a truck to the various properties, becoming dirty and tan and blonde.

“It just felt like this very free time, exploring the Island — and yes, we hitchhiked everywhere,” she said.

She purchased her home in Tisbury with her ex-husband in 2004, but it wasn’t until her divorce that she began to feel more like an Islander, spending more time here and making new friends. She volunteered at the food pantry and experienced the full cycle of the seasons.

“In this aftermath, I feel a sense of freedom that I have not had since I was in college,” she said — freedom in financial autonomy, in being single and in being a writer.

There’s also sense of new beginnings, she said. The ospreys next to her house have already returned. Soon, Ms. Burden will, too.

This article appears in April 24, 2026.