A Bookseller Breaks Down The Wild Success of ‘Strangers’

You probably haven’t been able to escape the discourse about Belle Burden’s runaway hit, Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage, since it debuted in January this year.

The memoir, which unpacks the circumstances behind Burden’s divorce during the height of the pandemic, went viral in 2023 as a Modern Love column in the New York Times. In that column Burden, a lawyer and Vanderbilt family heiress, broke down how she discovered her husband had been cheating on her in March 2020, and how her husband reassured her he loved her and was committed to their marriage—only to announce 24 hours later that he was leaving and didn’t want custody of their kids.

Her tale of betrayal and shock has taken bookstores (and Reddit threads) by storm. It’s among the top-10 hardcovers in Canada and is currently sitting in the top spot on the New York Times Bestseller List for the 13th week in a row. The book is a Heather’s Pick at Indigo and was recently optioned for a film adaptation starring Gwyneth Paltrow. In March, the author spent an hour breaking down her story with Oprah online (the views of which now sit at 3.6 million).

“You have written the manual,” Oprah told Burden. “You are everywoman. You have written the manual for every woman. It’s a memoir of marriage but it’s also a manual for every woman who has gone through divorce.”

What’s made Strangers such a phenomenon?

It is a genuine word-of-mouth hit that is really attracting readers, says Brandon Forsyth, category manager for Indigo. Those readers are largely women, he says.

Strangers’ success may be owing to its lightning-in-a-bottle combination of a profoundly resonant story and the circumstances around that story.

There’s strong interest, Forsyth says, in the book’s central question: How much do we know about the people in our lives and our partners in particular?

Burden isn’t a celebrity and she doesn’t have a massive social following. Her success—helped along by the virality of her Modern Love essay and as well as a strong marketing push by her publisher—is one of the rarer examples of a story hitting resonant beats with a large population of people that buy and read books, Forsyth says.

But more than that, he speculates that the context of the pandemic may be playing a role in deepening the emotional connection readers are having with the book too.

“The other piece of this story is the fact that this happened to her during COVID,” says Forsyth. “So many of us had that experience where you’re spending so much more time with your partners, and so I think that there is something people are latching onto as well in terms of how our relationships changed with our loved ones in that time.”

Burden’s story may be the dramatic extreme of some of the challenges people faced during the pandemic, but the marital and familial stresses and strains that defined that time for so many people may also be part of how readers interact with the material.

“I think there is something there that’s very universal in terms of our relationships,” Forsyth says.

But if we’re compelled by stories of sorrow and betrayal in love and family, Forsyth says, he’s seeing signs that the opposite side is just as compelling. He says one of the books that had a similar word-of-mouth lifespan this winter is If Only Love by Canadian author Shelley Saywell.

“It's kind of the flipside of Strangers’ story,” he shares, a romantic memoir about a woman who reconnects with her old high school flame after 20 years.  

“It’s this great romantic love story.”