The Media Gives Rich White Women Problems Too Much Attention
“Strangers” by Belle Burden demonstrates a frustrating trend where the least resilient and most privileged people are afforded the most attention for overcoming common problems on easy mode
I recently started listening to Strangers by Belle Burden on audiobook. Consider this a “beginning of the book” review because I already need to get some stuff off my chest.
Strangers is an autobiography in which the author chronicles her separation and divorce from her husband. As a divorcee myself, I feel like divorce is way too common to warrant a whole book about one person’s experience with it. But Strangers is so popular and well-reviewed that I decided to mute my divorce-book bias and try it.
Always trust your gut.
I’m trying to keep an open mind, but it’s hard to feel sorry for someone dealing with a common problem in the easiest way imaginable. Added to my uphill battle is the fact that Burden has zero resilience and unchecked internalized misogyny, which affects her young teenage daughters. I can’t stand weak-willed adults, and I especially can’t stand thoughtless parenting.
I am really trying to be sympathetic to the author; this separation came out of the blue, navigating grief is hard, and then the fact that women have to fight against their own unconscious biases regarding gender and relationships. But still. There were so many times I just found Belle Burden’s handling of the situation frustrating.
For example, her husband, James, abandons the family, then weeks later, comes back to begrudgingly tell his children that he is leaving them forever. During this visit, he has the gall to ask Burden to make him a sandwich, and then she fucking does. And not just any sandwich - she describes this tremendous effort she puts into making him this amazing sandwich. Meanwhile, she has been relying on her teenage daughter to make all the meals in the house since James left because she is too depressed to cook for her children. Tell that man to make his own fucking sandwich. And this comes after she had their house manager drive a jeep over to the airport so James could drive himself home instead of ordering a cab. Why aren't you catering to this shitty, shitty man?
Speaking of her daughters, this woman is a Boy Mom™. She mentions that another mom had to teach her 17-year-old son how to do laundry for the first time. Meanwhile, her 15-year-old daughter is cooking elaborate meals she learns on TikTok for the family. Just to recap and be 100% clear on this: a 15-year-old girl took the initiative to learn a necessary domestic skill and then performed it above and beyond; meanwhile, a 17-year-old boy is learning laundry for the first time ever after being hand-held through the process by another woman.
If you didn't read the book, the son is staying with friends somewhere (Long Island, IIRC), and the author is quarantined with her two daughters in Martha’s Vineyard. Anyway, the mom has this to say about her concern for her son as the divorce news is breaking at home: “I was relieved he wasn’t with us, stuck in a house of girls that felt heavy with sadness without any of his friends. Protected for a time from his father, who’s no longer there.”
I found this so infuriating that I paused the book. Let’s break down her internalized misogyny and how it ultimately hurts her children:
You are relieved that your son isn’t “stuck” in a house of girls? Why? What is wrong with being stuck in a house full of girls? Your son is going through the trauma and devastation of his father abandoning his family, and the bullshit you’re writing is essentially, “It could be worse - he could be around women!”
In a time of heavy sadness, don’t you think your son would rather be among family so he can process his emotions in a safe familial environment instead of being around friends where he’s probably feeling pressure to keep it together? It’s unfortunate that she lets her weird sexism dictate exiling her son, because studies apparently suggest that having sisters in a home is the most emotionally valuable family dynamic. So her son would likely be better off, emotionally, staying home in a house full of girls, especially since these are his sisters, and they are going through the same thing. Instead, he’s probably stuck repressing his emotions in a house of teenage boys. When we talk about how toxic masculinity ruins everything for men and women, this is what we mean.
Also, her husband had been “stuck” in a house with girls, his wife and his daughter. It wasn’t a problem for him. Why is it a problem for your son?
Her daughters are living without their friends, and they are fine, but the idea of her son being without his friends is unthinkable. Weird double standard.
It’s okay that her son is afforded the ignorance of his father not being around, while the daughters actively endure their father's absence.
It’s this kind of thoughtless, unconscious gender bias that keeps men emotionally unhealthy and women forced to bear hardship and responsibility where men are excused from doing the same. Her daughters are in the house, making dinner, caring for their mom, watching their family dynamic implode, but it’s the son that the mom goes on at length about, worrying, even though he is living in as much blissful ignorance as she can afford him.
Obviously, divorce is hard, especially when it is rooted in cheating. But I can’t help but contrast how she handles this versus how an average middle-class woman would. Burden has the luxury of falling apart in her vacation home on the expensive and exclusive Martha’s Vineyard. There is no mention of having to work a job. She writes about having friends call her every day and then spending hours every day talking about what she is going through. Meanwhile, there are women coping with cheating husbands abandoning their families everywhere, but those women still have to work and raise their kids. Burden has this one single tragic thing happen to her and is dealing with it in easy mode, yet feels entitled to document the whole thing in a book.
But I guess this would be legitimately devastating to her because she hasn’t dealt with anything hard in her life. She has zero resilience. She writes about how she wanted to be a writer and had even received writing awards and admission to an upper-year writing course as a freshman in college. Yet one man offered one unsubstantiated criticism of her writing in the class, and she immediately folded, abandoned her writing dreams, and pursued law school instead.
Belle Burden is wealthy. Her family line includes Old Hollywood and the Vanderbilts. She has been to the most expensive and prestigious schools in the United States. Whenever I read autobiographies by rich white women, it’s a real exercise in patience to take them seriously. Yes, their struggle was real, but it becomes such a defining part of them. I read all kinds of biographies. The ones by rich white women, like Burden, centre around a single incident of hardship that, for anyone else, would be just another incident in a series of events.
I’m not saying she isn’t allowed to be devastated - she absolutely is. But she got a book deal out of what didn’t need to be more than an essay on Substack. In fact, her story was first presented as an article in The New York Times. That was the maximum amount of media this story warranted.
I’m gonna hang in there and finish the book. Maybe something happens that changes my mind, and I come to sympathize with Burden. But I am not hopeful at the time of publishing this post.
Saved me the job of reading this!