Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage

I hope because I was open about what happened to me, my children will insist on intimacy, on knowing their partner deeply, on being known deeply. I hope they will talk to their partners about money, about what will happen if the partnership ends. I hope that as they build trust in their relationships, they never lose sight of their own authority, their own voice, their own intuition. I hope they will move toward people who are in pain, rather than away. I hope they will understand that every person has experiences that make them who they are. I hope they will fall in love with abandon as I did with their father. I hope they will know, from watching me, that if everything falls apart, they can get up and piece together something new.

It was having everything I had counted on collapse so suddenly, forcing me to let go of the idea that I could control outcomes.

She seemed to be reminding me of what we’d discussed many times, Everyone has something. This is yours. Each life has a defining crisis.

Even in my lowest moments, even in the nadirs of hurt and betrayal, I still believed in our love story, in our happiness as a family. Those stories are preserved in the words we wrote to each other, in the movies James made, in the albums I made, in the life we collected over the years. But they also exist in our kids' minds, in their skin and bones, in their souls. And in mine. James changed our present and our future, but not our past.

And doesn’t it all look different, wouldn’t your own story look different, if you knew how it was going to end?

Taylor Swift’s album folklore was released on July 24, Susan’s birthday. I had never been an avid fan, but it felt like the album was written especially for me. There were songs about illicit affairs, the end of a relationship (“you never gave a warning sign”), heartbreak, mad women. It became the soundtrack of my summer. I abandoned books and podcasts. I pressed play, again and again.

And I could see that the cost for feeling safe was being controlled. They were two sides of the same coin—protection and control.

Slowly, over many months, as my head came out of the sand, a form of joy set in —joy born of replacing the not knowing with knowing, the nub of worry with clarity, the lack of control with control...I thought, 'this is better than everything I lost. This is better than the life I thought I wanted.

We had all been taught to fill in the hole that men left, to be quiet about men behaving badly, to move on with grace.

If what happened in our divorce was vengeance, it was an existential vengeance, not a personal one. It had very little to do with me. And it existed on another plane from our love story.

Once again, the rigor of the work, the detail of it, was absorbing and grounding. It forced me to think about something other than my divorce. It also forced me to acknowledge how myopic, how grandiose I'd been about my own story. It wasn't just about recognizing my comparative good fortune (which was enormous); it was seeing the scope of life, of challenge, of suffering, of what human beings ensure; it was zooming out.

To them, a woman writing about a man leaving is, somehow, worse than the man leaving.

But I also tried to have compassion for the woman I was, agreeing to all of it, trusting my husband. I did it for love. There is nothing shameful about that.

I could see that some people, both online and in person, were uncomfortable with me coming out of my lane, a place where women stayed quiet, where men are allowed to do what serves them, no matter what the wreckage. I could see they were defending something bigger, a way of life, the safety it gave them.

People assumed that once James left, the moment he walked out the door, my love for him would vanish too. But how does one turn that off after twenty-two years? How long does it take your unconscious mind to catch up?

It is what he made clear within weeks of leaving, that he believed my contributions to his career, to our family, over twenty years, amounted to nothing.

Exactly a year after James left me

He said, in a singsong voice, like a taunting child, “Boo-hoo. Poor Belle. Always the victim.

I had never thought about this before—how a closed-ended response, no matter how well-intentioned, can feel like an ending—the declining of an invitation to engage.

I thought, How does a woman with a big job and two toddlers have the time, the energy, for an affair?

But to me, in my raw state, it felt like she was offering a blueprint for how the community should think about what happened to me: James is the injured party, not Belle. He is the prize. He is the one we should keep.

She was meticulous in crafting her image

The speed of our beginning and the speed of our ending, of his exit felt like matching book ends.

They expect you to disappear. And if you disappear from here

And doesn’t it all look different