How Does Strangers A Memoir Of Marriage End?

At the end of Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage, reader is left with the unassuming impression of how emotionally and institutionally harmful the husband’s decision to stop being part of the marriage is. The key scene that conveys the shock of this decision is when the husband tells his wife that he no longer wants to be part of their marriage and that she can have whatever she wants, including custody of their children, if she wants that. He then proceeds to move to the city and starts divorce proceedings. In the remainder of the book, the husband begins to transform from the comfortable and banal spouse who represents the familiar status quo of the marriage into a strange and even hostile figure. The husband’s transformation into an antagonist of the marriage is also a transformation into a controlling opponent in the divorce proceedings. The closing of the book and the ending of the marriage thus transitions from a shocking event to a long and difficult process of legal battling. But what is left with the reader at the end of the book is not only bitter resentment towards the husband. Rather, the ending of the book is also a turning point in Burden’s narrative of her marriage. It is the point at which she decides to tell the story of her marriage to her husband’s infidelities in order to move out of the recursive pattern of blame that has dominated her depiction of the marriage up until this point. Telling the story of her marriage thus allows Burden to start to move out of the marriage and to start to rebuild her life. The ending of the book thus has a sense of uplift and of a new beginning, as Burden is able to start to heal from her marriage and to find her voice again as a mother to her children. She does not write her husband up as a villain in order to provide dramatic conflict for the reader. Instead, she depicts him as being largely absent from her life, and thus she is able to write him out of the center of her life and her writing.

The ending of Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage is quietly devastating. In the end, the couple’s marriage is destroyed in a heartbreakingly abrupt manner. Burden describes waking up to her husband of many years telling her that he is unhappy and that he wants to divorce her. He gives her everything, including custody of their children, and moves to a small apartment in Manhattan where he converts a spare bedroom into an office. It is a space that symbolizes his absence from their home and life. The rest of the book explores the shock of that event and how Burden slowly and begrudgingly comes to terms with the end of their marriage. Rather than focusing on a dramatic confrontation with her ex-husband, the majority of the final sections of the book detail the often disgusting legal processes that must be gone through in order to gain divorce. The way in which Burden’s husband becomes more and more adversarial in their divorce negotiations is particularly compelling. Also explored in the book’s closing is how Burden’s personal essay, published as part of the Modern Love column in The New York Times, served as a catalyst for her healing. The memoir ultimately ends with a sense of Burden having reclaimed her voice and her agency in life. She is able to move forward from the very painful period of her life in which she was defined by her unhappy marriage to a strange and unfamiliar man. She is still very much in grief, but also excited to continue growing and to tackle the challenges of life as a single parent to their two children. I appreciated Burden’s honest portrayal of her very difficult time, and the way in which she was able to transform her pain into wisdom and grow from her experiences in order to become an even stronger and wiser person.

To summarize, when Burdman walked out on his wife after asking for a divorce at dawn, he was tossing her back to the life he wanted her to return to before they got together. He was leaving her to fight for their home and their life in a long, arduous, and often unpleasant legal battle. He was leaving her to an empty house with a strange man, once her husband, now a near stranger. But instead of being consumed by anger and grief, Burdman manages to find her way back to herself through her writing of their life together. The memoir ends with her having reclaimed her story through her writing of that time of their lives, first in her Modern Love essay and then in this full length memoir. The ending is quiet and powerful and true to who Burdman is – powerful because it contains all of the emotions we would expect to see there, anger and sadness and the search for meaning and reconciliation, but also true because it is also nuanced and realistic.